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SOCIAL SANITY 



BY TEE SAME AUTHOR 

SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT 
THE SUPER RACE 
A SOLUTION OF THE 

CHILD LABOR PROBLEM 
WAGES IN THE UNITED STATES 
ETC., ETC. 



SOCIAL SANITY 



A PREFACE TO THE BOOK OF SOCIAL 
PROGRESS 



BY 

SCOTT NEARING 

n 

WHARTON SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

1913 



COPYRIOHT, 1918, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 






I 



To those who believe : — 

In the fundamental integrity and nobility 
of human nature ; 

That knowledge should be placed before 
prejudice in the analysis of social problems ; 

That man has a kingdom of opportunity, 
duty, responsibility, effort, joy, and life; 

and 
That the golden age of the world lies in the 
present and in the future — not in the past, 

this book is dedicated. 



PREFACE 

A questioning age lays bare the innermost 
secrets which the scalpel of critical analysis will 
reveal. Nothing is so sacred, nothing so holy 
that it may claim exemption from the ordeal. 
Every available nook and cranny of life is 
searched, and the results of the investigation 
appear in the daily press. Publicity reigns. 

Nevertheless, when all is said, there must be 
some guiding idea behind analysis and criticism, 
else their best efforts lead nowhere beyond the 
desert of skepticism and disillusionment. Hence 
the necessity for seeking out and enunciating 
some precepts by the aid of which the course 
of society may be guided. Where is the North 
Star of Social Progress? By what unit shall 
men measure the Sanity of Social Action? Can 
there be devised a body of social metrics by 
means of which the course of society may be 
fairly judged? 



8 PREFACE 

It is the part of a sane society to ask these 
questions, at the very least. Perhaps there falls, 
too, within the boundaries of its obligation the 
duty to seek diligently till they be answered. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

INTRODUCTION 

I. THE LIFE STREAM 

II. THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 

III. THE KINGDOM OF MAN 

IV. PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 
V. LIFE AND LIVING 

VI. THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 

VII. HUMAN RIGHTS 

VIII. LIFE AND LABOR 

IX. THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 

X. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 

XI. THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 

XII. THE QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 



PAGE 
11 

21 

43 

60 

91 

105 

133 

145 

160 

191 

214 

237 

250 



INTRODUCTION 

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY 

Whatever the modern sociologists may have 
failed to do, they have at least emphasized the 
existence of a social psychology. The thought 
is, to be sure, not new. William Shakespeare 
had it in mind when he pictured Brutus and 
Mark Antony pleading their cause before the 
fickle mob of Eomans. In all forms of society, 
ancient and modern alike, the " social mind " 
is a commonplace. A baseball world series; 
a run on a bank; a Spanish- American war; a 
great catastrophe at sea; a panic; a strike of 
a hundred thousand, with its wild disorders, its 
braveries, its fierce, free contentions, and its 
display of human savageness and grandness, 
all afford ample laboratories for the study of 
social psychology. The thing lies at our doors 
in the shape of a daily paper; parades the 
streets on Memorial Day; cries out gleefully 
that the old year is dead, — ' ' Long live the New 
Year." 

The spirit of the crowd is more than, and 
is different from, the spirits of all of the in- 
dividual people who compose it. It is not an 

11 



12 SOCIAL SANITY 

aggregation of individual spirits, but a creation, 
a new being, — the group spirit. One who has sat 
under the spell of a great orator, who has seen 
him face a hostile audience, soothe their irri- 
tation, laugh away their enthusiasm for some 
cause, gradually identify himself with that 
cause, and then, by a rapid sweep of rhetoric, 
place things for which he is contending at the 
forefront of the cause in which the audience 
has been believing, has witnessed a typical dis- 
play of social psychology in its most primitive 
form. The words which Shakespeare makes 
Mark Antony address to the Romans show a 
keen insight into the psychology of an excited 
crowd. Mark Antony began by praising the 
conspirators, and ended by sending the mob 
to burn their houses. Meanwhile he had made 
the cause for which he stood a common cause. 
He had swept his deft fingers over the heart- 
strings of his audience, readily converting the 
emotions which he aroused into a demonstra- 
tion of ferocious hatred. After calming the 
anger of the crowd, Mark Antony stepped down 
to the hearse in which Caesar's body lay, with 
the words " If you have tears, prepare to 
shed them now. ' ' He showed the mantle which 
Caesar had first worn on the day of a great 
victory; showed the rent made in it by the 
daggers of the conspirators; showed the place 
where Caesar's blood rushed out of doors to 
see whether Brutus " so unkindly knocked, or 



INTRODUCTION 13 

no "; and at last showed the body " marred 
with traitors." " 0, now yon weep," he says, 
" and I perceive yon feel the dint of pity; 
these are precious drops." At that point Mark 
Antony had won the day. The tear stain is 
next of kin to the blood stain, and Mark An- 
tony was reckoning on that fact. 

In its elementary form, social psychology is 
based on the emotional side of human nature. 
Crowds are won through smiles, tears, yearn- 
ings, beliefs. 

With the spread of education the aspect of 
crowd psychology has changed radically. The 
newspaper, and the magazine, the easily ob- 
tained, readable books and pamphlets which 
are so widely circulated through private sources 
and in libraries, have enabled men in the re- 
motest parts of the country to keep in touch 
with the latest event and the newest idea. 
Before such people attend a meeting, they have 
thought, and discussed the subject in many of 
its aspects ; hence the modern orator must needs 
have more than a bare emotional appeal if he 
would win support. Even among those who 
do not or who cannot read has gone an agita- 
tion for social reform, in one of its many guises, 
impelling their intelligence, compelling their 
thought. As knowledge of facts and ideas 
has been universalized, the appeal to men's 
minds must be likewise universalized, hence 
the crowd psychology of the emotional town 



14 SOCIAL SANITY 

meeting house is transformed into the in- 
tellectual social psychology of towns, states, 
and nations. 

To be sure, a species of provincial psychology 
still manifests itself. The New Yorker returns 
home with the story of spending a week in 
Philadelphia the day before yesterday; the 
Pittsburger works madly with the Chicagoan, 
from early morning until late at night, to ac- 
complish he knows not what; in Cleveland, civic 
spirit conquers a seemingly impossible traction 
situation, communicating, meanwhile, its en- 
thusiasm to Cincinnati; the Wisconsin spirit 
burns strong in the breast of her statesmen, 
who believe in keeping pre-election pledges 
after they have once been made ; and Bostonians 
regard with an air of infinite satisfaction the 
institutions of Boston. Yet there are not want- 
ing many signs of change, even in the most 
settled of these ideas. The Wisconsin idea in- 
fused into the United States Senate, in the form 
of one of its leading exponents, has revivified 
and purged that body, mightily; the spirit of 
hurry is giving way to a recognition of the 
relative values in life; provincialism is on the 
wane; and the traveler looking through the 
window of the sleeper in the gray of the early 
morning is greeted everywhere by the same 
fantastic advertising signs, and the same cut 
of Chicago-made clothes. The same fruits and 
cereals appear on the breakfast table too, and 



INTRODUCTION 15 

waiters of the same race are equally obsequious 
under the stress of anticipation. 

The social mind, the public conscience, public 
opinion, — call it what you will, — has a more 
intelligent foundation and wider reach with 
each setting sun. Moreover, as it becomes more 
cosmopolitan, it becomes more elastic and tol- 
erant. 

Let no one suppose that the mind of the 
Roman mob, or of any similar group, is either 
elastic or tolerant. From the very nature of 
its composition, it has no basis for either qual- 
ity. Swayed with every wind of doctrine, it 
is the apotheosis of spineless bigotry. 

Any crowd which assembles to be spellbound 
by a past-master of oratorical chicanery can 
be swept from its feet and led to lengths of 
which its members little dreamed. It is from 
the citizen, conning the paper by the fire of an 
evening, or wrangling with his boon companions 
over a political or economic issue, that sane 
judgments may be expected. Could the popu- 
lation of the United States be assembled in one 
convention, it might be led to any lengths of 
irrational decision and conduct. Spread over 
wide areas, learning the issues of the day in- 
dividually, or in small knots, the public aban- 
dons the narrow, emotional psychology of the 
mob, and adopts, instead, the intellectual co- 
ordinated public opinion, bearing all the ear- 
marks of careful thought and sound judgment. 



16 SOCIAL SANITY 

Social psychology in the United States appears 
in the form of a public opinion whose impulse 
is guided by reason. 

Nowhere, perhaps, has the quality of Ameri- 
can public opinion been better revealed than 
in the present campaign against unfairness and 
dishonesty. From railroad magnate and dive 
keeper alike, the public is demanding square 
treatment. Open, frank, plain dealing has also 
been the rule of business. The grafter must 
go! There is no longer a place for him any- 
where in the organization of public life. Hon- 
esty is being enthroned, — an attitude which 
bodes well for the future, since it reveals the 
possibility of intelligent, sane group action. It 
is a long step from the Roman mob, venting its 
fury with sword and brand, to the American 
citizenry, presenting their mandates at the 
polls. 

The modern molder of progress may work 
with tools far superior to any known in the 
past. General intelligence he has, backed as 
it usually is by a virile enthusiasm and a reso- 
lute belief in the future, which leads inevitably 
from retrospection to outlook. Granted that 
these things be true, or reasonably true, they 
may be applied readily enough to a discussion 
of social sanity. 

There is a vast body of classified knowledge 
relating to insanity, but it is as difficult to in- 
terest scientists in sanity as it is to interest 



INTRODUCTION 17 

pedagogues in normal children. No limit of 
funds and infinite pains are available for the 
insane person or the sub-normal child, but for 
the sane person or the normal child it is fre- 
quently difficult to secure either sympathy or 
attention. Nevertheless since the normal is 
the only sure basis for progress, it behooves 
us to see to it that the normal things in life 
receive due consideration. 

A sane, healthy, sound, or normal man is one 
who displays the typical qualities of mankind; 
who possesses the type attributes, and acts in 
the type manner. The phrase, " Oh, he's 
crazy," is used to describe a person who has 
departed, to any considerable extent, from con- 
ventional standards; who, in other words, is 
not acting as people ordinarily act. When 
Judge Brack cries out, after Hedda's suicide, 
" Good God! People don't do such things! " 
he is giving vent to the conventional viewpoint. 
He might have put the matter concisely by say- 
ing, " Good God, she's crazy! " The sane man 
is the man who does the things that people are 
ordinarily expected to do. Any radical de- 
parture from this standard is non-sane or non- 
sense. Even those departures which are made 
by geniuses are described as insane until the 
crowd learns the viewpoint that prompted the 
action. Sanity, as the word is ordinarily em- 
ployed, consists in an attitude of mind which 
prompts the individual to follow such generally 



18 SOCIAL SANITY 

approved lines of action as will enable men to 
fulfill their desires. Using the broad generali- 
zation that the two fundamental desires of 
mankind are for self-preservation and for self- 
perpetuation, it may be said that sanity is evi- 
denced by those acts which will best guarantee 
the fulfillment of these desires; whereas in- 
sanity is a condition of unsoundness, a tendency 
away from the things that make for self-pres- 
ervation and self-perpetuation. Whereupon, 
sanity appears as a purely relative term, con- 
noting only the degree of removal from a state 
which insures the most complete self-preserva- 
tion and self-perpetuation. 

Society, like the individual, lives. Although 
the analogy between an individual and society 
may not be in all ways fortunate, the fact re- 
mains that society is an organism, and that the 
social mind is prone to abnormality as is the 
individual mind. Such pathological conditions 
as are clearly revealed in the decadent epochs 
of past civilizations, might be described as so- 
cial insanity, without any violence to language. 
Then to extend the analogy to normal condi- 
tions, social sanity would appear as that state 
of the social mind which would assure the pres- 
ervation and perpetuation of society. 

Accepting for the sake of argument this idea 
of sanity, it becomes at once apparent that so- 
ciety may do itself violence by taking an insane 
attitude, or may assure social advance by choos- 



INTRODUCTION 19 

ing sanely. Hence the vital importance of so- 
cial sanity. 

Before attempting to measure the sanity of 
some modern social tendencies, it may be well 
to emphasize certain principles of social action 
which are related to the question of social san- 
ity. In the first place, since social sanity is 
that state of the public mind which will lead 
to a form of action that will best insure the 
self-preservation and self -perpetuation of soci- 
ety, a democracy, in which the interests of the 
majority are dominant, will, if it be acting 
sanely, devote its energies to conserving major- 
ity welfare, no matter what hardships such ac- 
tions may impose upon the minority. This rule 
is obviously subject always to the law that an 
abuse of power by a democratic majority in- 
evitably leads to its overthrow by the opposing 
minority, which becomes in its turn the major- 
ity, and is subject to similar limitations. The 
sane actions of a democratic society would 
therefore be those actions which were directed 
toward satisfying the wants and supplying the 
needs of the majority. At the same time, in 
order to insure social stability, the majority 
will adopt those measures which afford a max- 
imum advantage to the majority, while at the 
same time they inflict a minimum of hardship 
on the minority. Acting thus, the democratic 
majority will insure the greatest present wel- 
fare and the soundest future for society. 



20 SOCIAL SANITY 

The importance, to a troubled, questioning, 
partially disillusioned, unrestful, discontented 
age, of realizing that a society with an unbal- 
anced mind (public opinion) may be as danger- 
ous to itself as an individual with an unbalanced 
mind, can scarcely be over-emphasized. The 
church, the industrial system, the institutions 
of representative government, the system of 
education, and the present type of family, have 
all been made the object of recent criticism. 
This generation will without question be called 
upon to determine the character of some of 
the changes which will be made in these insti- 
tutions. What principles shall govern their 
decisions? Is the path leading toward social 
betterment plainly marked? Certain things at 
least may be taken for granted. First, the 
facts, in so far as they are available, must be 
ascertained; second, they must be made a part 
of public knowledge; and third, society must 
act in such a manner that the welfare of the 
majority is insured, while that of the minority, 
wherever possible, is conserved. Careful in- 
quiry, through publicity and sane social action, 
— on these three foundation stones the struc- 
ture of a sound social progress may be erected. 



THE LIFE STREAM 

Osr some well-remembered day you may, per- 
haps, have sat beside a brook, watching the 
brown waters of late Oetober hurrying along, 
with here a flake of foam, and there a clump 
of birch leaves, swept down by the current. 
Each moment the appearance of the water 
changed, Each new aspect was more fascinat- 
ing than the last. You bent, spellbound, over 
the brown rock, weaving fancies with the glid- 
ing movements of the brook, whose troubled 
current was ever passing, passing, — framing 
pictures, gurgling songs, whispering poetry, 
telling tales. Sitting there, forgetful of your- 
self and of the world, your being flowed on 
with turbulent free-moving water and your soul 
joined with that other. For an instant, recog- 
nizing the kinship, you became again what you 
were as a child, — an unconscious drop in the 
great eddying life stream of the universe. 

Not alone in the October brook does the world 
move forward. Not alone in changing water 
forms is the transformation of the universe de- 
picted. On every hand lie evidences of the 
potency of change, — each new day, and each 

21 



22 SOCIAL SANITY 

new deed are tributes to its omnipresent power. 

Last spring we made a garden, partly be- 
cause fresh vegetables are very delicious, partly 
because they are hard to buy, and partly — I sus- 
pect mostly — because we loved to see things 
which were our own, grown from seed to fruit. 
We planned the garden and prepared the 
soil with the utmost care. Smooth quick-grow- 
ing peas went in early in April together with 
radishes, lettuce, carrots, beets, and potatoes. 
A week later these were followed by stringless 
green beans and the taller wrinkled peas; and 
in another fortnight by cantaloupes, early corn, 
and lima beans. Last of all tomato plants, 
egg-plants, late corn, and bush lima beans com- 
pleted the crops. By that time it was the middle 
of May. 

The month of April, in the neighborhood of 
this garden, was a sad, tearful month, remind- 
ing one of the reply which the driver in a 
Scotch Highland coach made to a passenger 
who, after a week of drizzling Scotch weather, 
was making unsuccessful efforts to dodge the 
drops from two umbrellas. 

" Does it always rain here? " groaned the 
passenger. 

" No, sir," answered the driver, " sometimes 
it snaws." 

If there were any days in this particular 
month of April when it did not either rain or 
snow, the sun may have shone, but they were 



THE LIFE STREAM 23 

so few as to be easily forgotten. The sun re- 
mained sulky until the middle of May, then, 
bursting out of the six-weeks-old cloud-bank, 
it did double duty, starting that part of the 
crop which had survived the wet, cold weeks 
into joyous growth. Early beets failed to come 
up, lima beans and early corn were planted 
two or three times before the semblance of a 
stand could be secured; nevertheless, by the 
end of May, there really was a garden, filled 
with gentle shadings of green, dotted here and 
there with the red of a beet leaf or the white 
of a pea or a potato flower. 

June, having no inkling of April's melan- 
choly, gave long hot days and balmy nights to 
the anxious crops and added a glamor to coun- 
try life which soon brought city visitors. Some 
among the uninitiated did not wake up to the 
existence of the garden until dinner time, but 
for the most part they meted out warm praise 
in such forms as, — 

" Isn't it wonderful! " 

" How did you do it? " 

" Hasn't the weather been perfect for gar- 
dens? " 

" Where did you get such beans? " 

" What splendid luck you have had! " 

Among all the myriad of city dwellers, 
scarcely one said, — ' * I see that nature and you 
have been at work," because scarcely one of 
them realized that, during the drenching rains 



24 SOCIAL SANITY 

in April, when it was next to impossible to 
cultivate and keep out the weeds, only the most 
careful attention could maintain a garden at 
all. Scarcely one of them understood that had 
May followed April's example, there would have 
been no crops. To them the garden was a thing, 
a creation, a being. They admired it as they 
would have admired a piece of fine china, or 
a new suit, or a landscape in the alcove of some 
museum, but they did not understand it. One 
of them, coming a second time, looked at the 
garden in amaze, crying: 

" How your garden has changed! " 

Yes, it had changed, otherwise it would not 
have been a garden. 

The chiefest thing about a garden is the fact 
of its change. Look at it to-day, it is one 
garden ; look at it next week, and it is another. 
More than that, from day to day — even from 
hour to hour and from minute to minute — the 
garden changes both its appearance and its 
form. Look at it, turn your back, then look 
again, and if your eyes were of microscopic 
precision, you could see that in that infini- 
tesimal space of time the garden was already 
a different place. 

Listen! city-folk, gardens do not happen. 
They are not built — Aladdin-like — in a single 
night. They grow. They become, or rather 
they are becoming, a process which alters with 
each advancing unit of time. 



THE LIFE STREAM 25 

All analogies are susceptible of abuse, nor 
can one pretend that the garden analogy is an 
exception to that general rule, yet more clearly 
than the voice of the brook it tells the story 
of the life stream, for the whole universe and 
every part of it is like the garden, a process 
of transformation from the thing that is to that 
which is to be. From the smallest amoeba, sub- 
dividing to make two of its kind, to the fearful 
chase of our planetary system across the 
heavens, the universe is undergoing change. 
The mushroom shoots in a night; the oak grows 
in a century; the sperm cell and ovum uniting 
produce a snake, or a turtle, or a frog, or a 
brown thrush as the case may be; the little 
creature fresh from the egg grows up and in 
its turn helps to form new life; the desert sands 
shift with the wind ; the mountains, yielding to 
the onslaughts of the water drops, flatten them- 
selves into plains. The springs empty their tiny 
rivulets into vast oceans, which, rolling inces- 
santly against the shore, are building or tear- 
ing down; the antelope crushes the succulent 
grass against its flat grinders; the tiger springs 
and the antelope has perished; the mosquito 
hums his song of a day; and man is born and 
lives and at threescore and ten renders up 
the ghost. With what fidelity does William 
Cullen Bryant picture these changes among 
men: — 



26 SOCIAL SANITY 

u Yet a few days, and thee 
The all-beholding sun shall see no more 
In all his course." 

" Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim 
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again." 
" The gay will laugh when thou art gone, 
The solemn brood of care 
Plod on, and each one as before will chase 
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall 
leave 
Their mirth and their employments, and shall 
come 
And make their bed ivith thee" 

The universe, like the garden, is a process, — 
a changing thing. Never for a moment does 
it cease its tireless transformations. It was, 
it is, it will be different. From that idea has 
grown up, among other things, the philosophy 
of evolution. 

The time has passed when it is necessary to 
apologize for believing in change. The work 
of Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, Huxley, Haeckel, 
and a myriad of less known men has established 
beyond cavil the principle that the world of 
biology is a world of constant progression. 
Spencer compares organic evolution to the de- 
velopment of an individual organism. " Each 
organism," he writes, " exhibits, within a short 
space of time, a series of changes which, when 
supposed to occupy a period indefinitely great, 



THE LIFE STREAM 27 

and to go on in various ways instead of one 
way, give us a tolerably clear conception of 
organic evolution in general. ' ' * Elaborating 
the same idea, Huxley wrote in his usual virile 
English: " The hypothesis of evolution sup- 
poses that in all this vast progression there 
would be no breach of continuity, no point at 
which we could say, ' This is a natural process,' 
and ' This is not a natural process '; but that 
the whole might be compared to that wonderful 
process of development which may be seen go- 
ing on every day under our eyes, in virtue of 
which there arises, out of the semi-fluid, com- 
paratively homogeneous substance which we 
call an egg y the complicated organism of one 
of the higher animals. That, in a few words, 
is what is meant by the hypothesis of evolu- 
tion.' 'f 

The idea of change — of evolution if you will — 
sounds the keynote of modern thought. The 
field of biology, presenting boundless oppor- 
tunity for laboratory study, has yielded the 
most concrete, satisfying testimony regarding 
the character of those changes which seem to 
be an attribute of the whole universe. J. A. 
Thomson writes in his brilliant popularization 
of modern biologic theory: — 

* " Principles of Biology, n H. Spencer. New York ; D. Apple- 
ton & Co., 1897. Vol. I, p. 349. 

f" American Addresses," T. Huxley. London : Macmillan & 
Co., 1877. Pp. 10,11. 



28 SOCIAL SANITY 

" There is an intricate, beautiful, rational 
pattern before us in nature; are we to think 
of it as woven, thread by thread, by invisible 
hands in a way past finding out scientifically; 
or was there so much mind put into the original 
institution of things — an apparently simple 
loom — that thenceforth the web has been worked 
out automatically in a manner that admits of 
scientific formulation? . . . It is a simple but 
eloquent fact that the genealogical record in 
the fossil-bearing rocks shows the gradual ap- 
pearance of higher and higher forms. At a 
certain stage in the history of the earth all the 
animals were invertebrates; then fishes ap- 
peared, then amphibians, then reptiles, then 
birds and mammals. As the ages have passed, 
life has been slowly creeping upwards. The 
rock-record corresponds in its sequences with 
those deducible from comparative anatomy and 
embryology. . . . What can be securely said 
is this, that all biological facts can be used as 
evidence of evolution if we know enough about 
them, and there are no biological facts which 
are inconsistent with it, so far as we know." * 

The animate world undergoes constant 
change. Individual organisms develop. In the 
last analysis, the whole realm of biology is a 
complex process of continual change. 

Although it is in the field of biology that the 

# " Darwinism and Human Life," J. A. Thomson. New York : 
Henry Holt & Co., 1910. Pp. 19-26. 



THE LIFE STREAM 29 

most effective work, experimental and deduc- 
tive alike, has been carried on, the principle 
of evolution is applicable not alone to things 
biologic. There is every reason to believe that 
the institutions of human society, like the in- 
dividual beings in the biologic world, are under- 
going constant modifications. Consider, for ex- 
ample, the family, — -perhaps the oldest of social 
institutions. All available facts point to the 
conclusion that the family has undergone radical 
modifications through . the ages. Even those 
who deny the evolutionary principle on the basis 
of Christian teachings will find in the Bible the 
very clearest evidences of family change. The 
patriarchal family under Jacob, with his numer- 
ous slave-wives and wife-slaves, would scarcely 
be regarded as a model to-day. Solomon's con- 
jugal relations could not now be made a matter 
of discussion except among scandalmongers, 
yet Solomon was the blessed of the Lord. A 
great gulf exists between the crude family forms 
of the old Hebrews and the family existing to- 
day; yet the Hebrews were a civilized people. 
Go back of them to the barbarians and back 
of them again to the savages, and observe the 
marked difference in the relations of men and 
women. In his painstaking work on " The 
Evolution of the Family, " Letourneau writes : — 
" In a remarkable book, which has not yet had 
all the success it deserves, Lewis Morgan be- 
lieves he has recognized five stages in the evo- 



30 SOCIAL SANITY 

lution of the family: 1st, the family is consan- 
guineous — that is to say, founded on the mar- 
riage of brothers and sisters of a group ; 2nd, 
several brothers are the common husbands of 
their wives, who are not sisters; 3rd, a man 
and woman unite, but without exclusive co- 
habitation, and with facility of divorce for one 
or the other; 4th, then comes the pastoral family 
of the Hebrews, the marriage of one man with 
several women; but this patriarchal form has 
not been universal; 5th, at last appeared the 
family of civilized societies, the most modern, 
characterized by the exclusive cohabitation of 
one man and one woman. Not taking this clas- 
sification too literally, and reserving a place for 
varieties and exceptions, we have here five 
stages which mark tolerably well the evolution 
of the family in humanity. ' ' * 

The best known and by far the most accessible 
of discussions on the evolution of the family 
exists in the Old Testament. There are set 
down, in great detail, the marriage customs of 
the Hebrews. Under the patriarchs, the family 
was avowedly polygamous, — there was one man, 
with many wives. As the civilization developed, 
the prophets and teachers began to discourage 
this form of union, until, in the teachings of 
the New Testament, there stands clearly out 



#M The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family," Ch. Le- 
tourneau. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904. P. 347. 



THE LIFE STREAM 31 

the modern form of monogamy, the exclusive 
cohabitation of one man with one woman. 

Walter Rauschenbusch, writing from the pre- 
cincts of a theological seminary, depicts the 
change by imagining that, in the year 4000 b.c. 
a Syrian village had fallen asleep, and was 
awakened to life to-day. The people take up 
the affairs where they left them, discussing the 
social unrest, and its dangers to their civiliza- 
tion, when they are interrupted by the pastor 
of " a staid Pennsylvania town ' ' " who prides 
himself on being untainted by radical social 
notions.' ' After listening to their tales of woe, 
he expounds the orthodox conception of the 
American family as the true solution, " advis- 
ing them to treat the wives as their equals, to 
live for their children, and to give the servants 
one night off per week. ' ' Patiently they explain 
to the stranger " that his views are Utopian; 
that authority would be undermined if a 
man could not beat his wife "; " that polygamy 
is an index of high morality, since the best citi- 
zens have the most wives, and you would have 
to change human nature to make monogamy 
compulsory; that slaves would have nothing to 
eat if they had no masters to feed and employ 
them, that a father, being the author of a child's 
life, has a right to take its life if he considers 
it superfluous. The American, aglow with 
Christian indignation, describes how wisely his 
wife manages the common finances and selects 



32 SOCIAL SANITY 

his neckties ; how he sends his girls to Vassar "; 
and how he would hate himself if his family 
regarded him as a tyrant. " But he sees dark 
frowns gathering on the faces and ominous 
whisperings running about. He pales as he 
hears the ancient Hittite equivalent for 
' .socialist and anarchist ' applied to him- 
self."* 

Whatever the field of study, the conclusion 
is ever the same. The family has changed dur- 
ing historic times. Under the impetus of an 
evolutionary process called civilization the loose 
conjugal relations of primitive society have been 
gradually replaced by the more binding forms 
of modern social relations. 

No social institution is exempt from this law. 
The present idea of private property is accepted 
as an established fact, men and women take its 
presence for granted, as they do the presence 
of any common social usage. Yet the modern 
idea of property has developed in comparatively 
recent times. Only in those countries which 
are under the sway of Western civilization is 
the current idea of property accepted. Among 
the tribes at present on the earth may be found 
every practice from the most complete commu- 
nism to the most utter individualism, though 
the communistic forms of property are far more 

*'* Christianizing the Social Order," Walter Rauschenbusch. 
New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912. Pp. 132-133. 



THE LIFE STREAM 33 

common. Like every other social usage the 
modern ideas of property have grown. 

In his series of daring essays on the " Evo- 
lution of Property,' 7 Laf argue traces the prop- 
erty idea through its various phases of primitive 
communism, family collectivism, and feudal 
property, to the present forms of bourgeois 
property. While there may still be some ques- 
tion regarding the exact limitations of La- 
f argue 's classifications, there can be little doubt 
that the contrast between feudal property, held 
14 for God and the king," and modern private 
property, demised " to him and his heirs for- 
ever," is a fundamental one. The king is no 
longer regarded as the liege-lord; the church 
has lost the power which once permitted her 
to dominate property transactions. The law 
alone now sanctions while the property passes 
from man to man. 

Letourneau summarizes his scholarly w r ork 
on property with this statement — " At first 
they [property rights] were born and devel- 
oped beneath the shelter of the communal clan, 
then of the village community, guaranteeing all 
its members against abandonment, but permit- 
ting no one to monopolize what belonged to all. 
Under such a system population everywhere 
abounds; the increase is enormous, and gener- 
ally it overflows into neighboring countries. In 
Kussia, for example, the system of the mir im- 
pels to marriage and is opposed to Malthusian- 



34 SOCIAL SANITY 

ism, because each family has a right to a larger 
portion of land the larger the number of work- 
ers it contains, and the most numerous family 
is in consequence the richest. As security 
increased, property has become more individual 
and movable, and there has been formed what 
economists call i capital, ' that is to say, a mass 
of accumulable values representing work." * 

As in the case of the family, so in the case 
of property, the records of history show changes 
of the most fundamental nature. Perhaps these 
social institutions, their origin shrouded in the 
" dim mysterious past," may not prove con- 
vincing arguments in favor of the principle of 
social evolution. Turn then to an evolution that 
has gone on under the eyes of your father, or 
if you are very young, of your grandfather. 
Study the transformations wrought in the 
course of three short generations by the forces 
of modern industry, and be convinced of the 
wonders of social changes. 

As late as 1850, in a now prosperous section 
of New York State, the farmer's boy rose with 
the dawn, hitched a team of oxen to a wagon 
loaded with sacks of wlieat, and started for 
the mill. All of that day he traveled, and in 
the late afternoon reached a town in which there 
was a mill. The next day the miller, a long, 



♦"Property: Its Origin and Development," Ch. Letourreau. 
London : Walter Scott, 1901. Pp. 369, 370. 



THE LIFE STREAM 35 

pale man, poured this wheat into his hopper, 
taking as his toll one bag in every four, and the 
farmer's boy, loading the flour into his wagon, 
made ready for an early start the next day. 
By nightfall he was at home again with his 
wheat transformed into flour. Then his mother, 
making her own yeast and potato water, 
kneaded and set her bread over night, and in 
the morning the boy built a hot fire in the old 
stone oven, heated the stones well, raked out the 
fire, and put the bread in its place to be baked. 

How different the process to-day ! The wheat 
carried in a freight car from Dakota to Min- 
neapolis is converted into flour and shipped by 
rail to Buffalo. There it goes to a baker, is 
tested, and turned into a machine which auto- 
matically measures the proper quantities of the 
various ingredients, mixes them, kneads them, 
divides them into loaves, and delivers them to 
the oven. In one day this child of human in- 
genuity makes fifty thousand loaves of bread. 
It is tended by five boys who merely watch the 
machine to see that all goes right. The reaper, 
the thresher, the elevator, the railroad, the 
power mill — all of these, and all of the thou- 
sands of tools and appliances which make them 
possible — are the product of half a century. 
During the progress of an ordinary life, the 
whole world of industry has been transformed 
through the process of industrial evolution. 

Nothing is exempt from its sway. The nails, 



36 SOCIAL SANITY 

boards, shoes, caps, coats, chairs, carpets, but- 
tons, wagon-wheels, forks, pocket-knives — all of 
the things which were formerly made by hand — 
are now factory products. Each year the scope 
of the factory widens and each year the variety 
of its products increases. Industry has revo- 
lutionized society. This evolution of industry 
differs from the evolution of other social in- 
stitutions only in this, that it has come with 
great rapidity and that it has been in large 
measure a product of conscious human activity. 

Did space permit illustrations might be mul- 
tiplied. The church, the school, the state, and 
the home are all the product of a long series 
of changes, definitely traceable through the 
ages. They are a part of that process by 
which barbarism and savagery have been re- 
placed by the civilization of the past five thou- 
sand years, — a civilization which history shows 
to have been in a continual state of evolution. 

Every phase of the mechanism of life re- 
veals the presence of changes. " The central 
idea of evolution is that the present is the 
child of the past and the parent of the future," 
writes Thomson; " it is the idea of progressive 
change from phase to phase without loss of 
continuity. A process of Becoming leads to a 
new phase of Being — whether in solar systems 
or in social institutions or in living creatures. 
But in the first the continuity is sustained in 
identity of substance, in the second by tradition 



THE LIFE STREAM 37 

and social registration, and in the third by the 
hereditary linkage of successive generations." 

Ideas, like institutions, have developed with 
the passing centuries. Augmented, here a little 
and there a little, they present, at last, the 
imposing picture reflected in modern civiliza- 
tion. Summarizing a well-made study of the 
development of society, Morgan writes, " The 
latest investigations respecting the early con- 
dition of the human race, are tending to the 
conclusion that mankind commenced their 
career at the bottom of the scale and worked 
their way up from savagery to civilization 
through the slow accumulation of experimental 
knowledge." * Ideas, the backbone of civiliza- 
tion, have grown like all else, and still society 
moves forward, accumulating knowledge as it 
goes. 

Up to a certain point society changed, no 
man knew how or why. Then with dawning 
intelligence, man took upon his own shoulders 
the burden of altering institutions, in exactly 
the same way that he took upon himself the 
burden of changing plants and animals. The 
race horse, the cart horse, the King Charles, 
the greyhound, the Jonathan apple, the Hol- 
stein cow, the lima bean, and the plum tomato 
are all the products of human interference with 
natural processes. The facts of life change. 

•" Ancient Society," L. H. Morgan. New York: Henry 
Holt & Co. (First ed. 1877.) Edition of 1907. P. 3. 



38 SOCIAL SANITY 

Hence it is that ideas, founded on knowledge, 
are as much subject to change as biologic spe- 
cies. The fervent beliefs of one era are brushed 
aside by the skepticism of the next. Crusading 
ardor gives place to commercial activity; the 
slave holding agricultural era bows before the 
epoch of machine controlling freemen. Here 
the church and the state are one ; there they are 
as far apart as the east and the west — neither 
knowing nor caring what the other may essay 
or accomplish. 

The spirit of the West is a spirit of changing 
ideas. Holding but lightly the traditions of 
the past, it rejects an idea as soon as a more 
serviceable one can be found to take its place. 
" Edward A. Filene of Boston, who in his own 
large establishment has put many advanced 
ideas into operation, observes that, l Ideas go 
into the scrap heap about as often as machines, ' 
and it is a mark of health in the present age 
that it shows unusual willingness to change 
both."* 

The individual is as much subject to change 
as is society. From youth to old age ideas 
are in process of alteration. It is as unnatural 
to find in youth the conservatism of old age, 
as it is to find in age the radicalism of youth. 
Mr. Stevenson in his incisive comments on 
" Crabbed Age and Youth " sums the matter 

* " Industry and Progress," Norman Hapgood. New Haven : 
Yale University Press, 1911. P. 33. 



THE LIFE STREAM 39 

up by saying, " All my old opinions were only 
stages on the way to something else." But 
such doctrines are the apotheosis of inconsist- 
ency. Well, and what of that? "A foolish 
consistency," cries Emerson scornfully, " is 
the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little 
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With 
consistency a great soul has simply nothing to 
do. He may as well concern himself with his 
shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded 
lips ! Sew them up with pack-thread, do. Else, 
if you would be a man, speak what you think 
to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and 
what to-morrow thinks in hard words again; 
though it contradict everything you said to- 
day." * Those who oppose the idea of change 
in form or thought resemble the chairman of 
a recent national political convention, who, as 
Mr. Dooley remarked, was " one of them that 
would like to make the temporary organization 
of the world permanent." 

Returning for a moment to a former illus- 
tration, each thing in our garden was a product 
of human selection. The weeds, the only natu- 
ral things which made an appearance there, 
were ruthlessly destroyed. The vegetables, 
man-made, supernatural, are so wholly the 
product of human activity that they are unable 
to care for themselves. Left alone, the beet 

♦Essay on " Self -Reliance." 



40 SOCIAL SANITY 

would produce small roots, the corn would shoot 
thin and yellow. Man's products need man's 
protection. The weeds may not compete, — the 
plants must have an absolute monopoly. The 
spray-pump must not stay its activities, other- 
wise the beetle devours the cantaloupes, the 
black-rot ruins the tomatoes, the leaf-gall afflicts 
the grapes, blights and rusts attack beans and 
potatoes. What man has made he must guard 
against the natural afflictions which assail each 
unnatural product. 

The same principle holds true in the case 
of social institutions. Man has built up sys- 
tems of government, education, and industry. 
They are splendid monuments to his intellect, 
but let him for a moment relax his vigilance 
and they decay as did the earlier civilizations 
of the East. The blights and rusts of idleness 
and licentiousness gain a foothold; the bacteria 
of graft germinate; and the institutions totter 
and fall. Eternal vigilance is the price of a 
civilization as it is of a garden. What man 
has made, man must protect and maintain. 

Social institutions, like biologic species, are 
processes. The whole universe is a becoming. 
Even while we turn our backs and look 
again, it has changed and always will be 
changing. 

14 That which lies beyond the human race," 
writes Huxley, " is a constant struggle to main- 
tain and improve, in opposition to the State 



THE LIFE STREAM 41 

of Nature, the State of Art, of an organized 
polity, in which and by which man may develop 
a worthy civilization, capable of maintaining 
and constantly improving itself." * 

So much then lies in the life stream, which, 
whether in its changing species, institutions, 
or ideas, is an exemplification " of Nature's 
great progression, from the formless to the 
formed — from the unorganic to the organic — 
from blind force to conscious intellect and 
will."f The time never has been, the time 
can never be when the question before men is, 
11 Shall we change or shall we not change? " 
There is no other issue — no other possibility. 
Man may guide the stream of becoming — even 
though he may not stop it. He cannot change 
the path of the stars, but he can straighten 
the streets of old cities and build the streets 
of new ones straight. He cannot reshape the 
earth, but he can so renovate his social system 
that the earth will be a better dwelling-place 
for his children than it has been for him. Man 
cannot dictate, but he can counsel. He cannot 
create, but he may direct. He cannot dam the 
life stream, but he can build jetties and levees 
along the banks. 

Herein lies the basis of the problem of a 

** 4 Evolution and Ethics/' T. H. Huxley. New York: D. 
Appleton & Co., 1902. P. 44. 

t" Man's Place in Nature," T. H. Huxley. New York: D. 
Appleton & Co., 1902. P. 151. 



42 SOCIAL SANITY 

changing universe, a changing society, a chang- 
ing institution, — in what respects can man's 
conscious actions modify those changes so that 
they make the world a better dwelling-place 
for him and for his children? 



n 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 

The life stream is understood through sci- 
ence — which is another word for classified 
knowledge. Always the life stream has flowed 
on, from everlasting to everlasting, but man 
failed to grasp its meaning, until, by the use 
of language, of story, of writing, of printing, 
of tools and instruments, he gradually collected 
a body of knowledge about the world in which 
he lived. Then it became apparent that there 
were great laws of life and of death, — princi- 
ples which were inherent in all natural phe- 
nomena. 

While man was an unthinking being, com- 
parable to the most primitive races of the 
present day, he left no monument. Each gen- 
eration disappeared, leaving no mark of its pas- 
sage save that which was made by the presence 
of its descendants. Such is the life of most 
animals. Such for eons of time must have been 
the life of man. 

In this primitive life, nature, so careful of 
the race-stream, so apparently careless of the 
single being, swept generation after generation 

43 



44 SOCIAL SANITY 

ruthlessly aside, as a child might build block 
houses, and, tumbling them down, rebuild them 
again day after day. Yet the child learns by 
building, making each new castle better than 
its predecessor. So, too, in nature's building, 
each new generation was built out of the flower 
of the old, since the fittest survived to be the 
parents of the future. As the ages passed, it 
became apparent that the fittest was an in- 
dividual organism, in a very advanced stage of 
development, — an individual who should ulti- 
mately be put before the race to which he be- 
longed. 

At first this individual was one select indi- 
vidual — the chief, or patriarch, whose life 
counted for more than the life of the whole 
clan or family. For all men this life was sacred, 
since the welfare of all depended upon its con- 
tinuance. Then, in the course of ages, the be- 
lief grew up that the lives of all men must be 
considered sacred, since no man was inherently 
better than another; and to-day, when a great 
liner sinks at sea, the best men step aside, 
leaving the way to safety open to the most 
humble women and children. The individual — 
not as a leader, or king, or lord, but as an in- 
dividual — has been recognized. 

As man became individualized he began to 
take thought — thought for the morrow and 
thought for others. The very act of taking 
thought made him still more of an individual. 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 45 

Thus the two forces — the one developing a 
being capable of independent thought and ac- 
tion; the other, increasing individualization 
through individual thought and action, — acting 
and reacting, — erected, gradually, a type of 
man who had both foresight and altruism. 

Let no one suppose that these are exclusively 
human attributes. Many animals exhibit fore- 
sight. " Go to the ant, thou sluggard," coun- 
sels the sage, " consider her ways and be wise." 
In times of plenty, she lays in a store against 
the time when nature is less bountiful. How 
much more intelligence does this display than 
some primitive races, who have in the language 
no word which will convey the idea, " the day 
after to-morrow," because it has never been 
necessary for them to think so far into the 
future. Whether foresight is the outgrowth of 
the necessity for some check on the emotions, 
or of some other equally important advantage, 
need not delay the argument. The fact remains 
that men begin to survey the past, analyze the 
present, and speculate on the future. Thus his- 
tory, science, and philosophy have their rise 
out of man's attempt to measure the forces of 
the universe and to adjust himself to his sur- 
roundings. Besides these thought develop- 
ments which are involved in the provision of a 
livelihood for his own maintenance and that of 
those dependent on him, man expresses the con- 
structive and esthetic side of his nature in the 



46 SOCIAL SANITY 

creation of objects which he considers useful 
and beautiful, the former assisting in the pro- 
curing of a living; the latter pleasing the eye. 
As society advances, first the mother and then 
the father take upon themselves a more active 
responsibility for the care of their young until 
there is developed that altruism which is one 
of the most far-reaching forces of civilization. 
Although primitive man lives essentially in 
the present, it is a noteworthy fact that careful 
thinking, both as to the future and the past, 
preceded careful thought about the present. As 
far back as historic records afford evidence, 
men were speculating about things other than 
those concerned with the immediate present. 
In the Middle Ages this spirit had attained 
so great an impetus that the learned men 
who could give an intimate description of 
the narrowest confines of hell, and furnish 
an accurate account of the actions of the 
different angels of the celestial regions, had 
not the remotest idea about the physical geogra- 
phy of their own country, or of the chemical 
composition of the foods which they ate. Dwell- 
ing continually in a realm of metaphysical ab- 
stractions, the purveyors of knowledge foisted 
upon the uninitiated intellectual commodities 
more monstrously misbranded than any which 
the wildest dreams of nineteenth century com- 
mercialism could have devised. Not only has the 
flimsiest speculation about the past sold under 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 47 

the guise of authenticity, not only did prognos- 
tications about the future pass as current coin 
of the spiritual realm, but the speculation 
of the past and the prophecy over the future 
dominated the thought of the present, until the 
man who failed to agree with Aristotle, or 
who denied the infallibility of the Apocalypse, 
was a candidate for the torment, the dungeon, 
and the stake. 

It remained for the nineteenth century to 
apply the speculations of earlier ages to the 
life of the present, and through the institution 
of a scientific at+ ; tude toward the world in 
which we live, to reshape civilization. The 
Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks were 
at one time definitely scientific in their attitude 
toward life, but for centuries the spirit of sci- 
ence slumbered, — half awaking, now and again, 
when some choice soul proclaimed the eternal 
verities as he saw them. 

Throughout the epoch of reverence of the 
past and awe of the future, dogma and tradi- 
tion, throttling the spirit of investigation, dark- 
ened the ages with the blackness of barbaric 
ignorance. Slowly their hold loosened, how- 
ever, until, in the nineteenth century, a premium 
was laid on scientific ability and the world 
reaped, and is still reaping, a great harvest of 
scientific achievement. 

The spirit of science is the spirit of progress, 
demanding of each phenomenon an explanation 



48 SOCIAL SANITY 

of its significance and potency. Science has 
no preconceived answer. Instead it questions 
the facts in each case, frankly asking " How? " 
and " Why? " — investigating, discovering, ana- 
lyzing, and proclaiming. Science knows neither 
right nor wrong. She seeks the truth. 

Science deals with the life stream as it is, — 
its ingredients, its velocity, its gradient, its 
direction, its quays, and its docks. The dogma 
of past ages holds neither attraction nor terror 
for the scientist, — he merely questions the liv- 
ing present; scorning bigotry, seeking enlight- 
enment, and bespeaking progress. Science 
would tell man, first, what the life stream is, 
and second, how it may be used to the greatest 
human advantage. In its broadest sense, the 
spirit of science is a spirit of frank recognition 
of the world as it is, and of an equally frank 
endeavor to use it to greater human advan- 
tage. 

How fatal are the results of an unscientific 
attitude in every walk of life ! How bitter the 
visitations of disappointment, how swift the 
punishments which Nature metes out to him 
who ignores her! Science holds out a hand of 
glad hope to mankind. How soon will he see 
and understand? 

" Come," I asked a small farmer, late in 
March, " plow this piece of land for me." 

" Now see here," he protested, " you can't 
plow land this early, it's full of water." 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 49 

" Well, I'm paying you for your time, and 
the risk is mine." 

The good fellow, fearful of doing me an in- 
jury, shook his head, got out his plow, and 
obeyed. The plow was rusty, not having been 
used before that year, but after two or three 
furrows, the land broke beautifully, and in one 
harrowing was pulverized almost to the con- 
sistency of ashes. 

My friend stopped his horses, took off his 
hat, and exclaimed in a disappointed tone, 
1 * Well, I never see land plow so well this early 
in the spring. It sure is remarkable." 

Truly there was nothing remarkable about 
the performance. The land in question was in 
a high state of cultivation — loamy and full of 
humus. It naturally plowed easily. Further, 
while the normal amount of rain had fallen 
that spring, nearly every storm had been so 
torrential that a large part of the water had 
run off without sinking into the soil. These 
facts had escaped my good friend's attention. 
Without thinking about the matter at all, he 
had been unwilling to experiment because " you 
can't plow land this early." His grandfather 
and father had plowed at a certain date. In 
the course of his bounden duty, he honored his 
father by plowing at the same time. The idea 
of plowing earlier — well, it had never even 
occurred to him. 

Strange, it will undoubtedly sound to many 



50 SOCIAL SANITY 

persons concerned in making a living out of 
the soil, but there is just one way to determine 
whether land will plow at a given time — that 
is to run a furrow and see what happens. The 
question is purely a question of fact, — of the 
consistency of the soil, of the amount of mois- 
ture it contains, of the lay of the land, and of 
the weather. There is no opportunity for spec- 
ulation or dogma. Either the land will plow 
or it will not. 

The city-born man will doubtless appreciate 
this countryman's ignorance of facts, — how 
stupid countrymen seem to be ! Yet how easily 
may the countryman reciprocate ! 

" Who is that chap who sold you the bogus 
stock? " asked one farmer of another. 

" That," answered the other, " is the city 
fellow who is paying fifty cents a gallon for 
crystal spring water out of my mill pond." 

The countryman is not alone in ignoring 
facts. The ignorance of people everywhere 
would be laughable if it were not so pitiful. The 
city population is prone to forget that many 
of the vital affairs of life, heretofore dependent 
on tradition or custom, are likewise susceptible 
of scientific analysis and report. How many 
city folks of your acquaintance pay five cents 
for a trolley ride, never once dreaming of 
making a protest. Protest? Why should we 
protest, has not the fare always been five cents? 
How could it be otherwise? In large towns 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 51 

and small cities — everywhere people give up 
five cents. In some cities they receive free 
transfers, in others they pay for them. There 
was one city, Cleveland, which, in an inquiring 
state of mind, asked first itself, and later the 
traction company, how much it really cost to 
carry passengers. As a result of the inquiry, 
passengers are carried in Cleveland — which, by 
the way, is a city of half a million, spread out 
for miles along the lake front — for three cents, 
universal transfers are given, and the company 
makes six per cent on its investment. Nothing 
like that was ever done before ! No, but it will 
be duplicated many times when city folks grasp 
the spirit of fair-minded science. 

The Cleveland street-car situation was typ- 
ical of that in most other large American cities. 
People were paying five cents for a ride while 
the actual cost of carrying passengers, based 
on a fair valuation of the property and a fair 
return on the investment, was almost exactly 
three cents per passenger. No witchcraft was 
employed to obtain that answer. Accountants, 
engineers, and traction experts made a study 
and a report. If people could be carried at a 
fair profit for three cents, why pay more? 
Why indeed! The people of Cleveland an- 
swered the question by paying no more. You 
can travel to that city to-morrow, purchase five 
tickets for fifteen cents, get a free transfer on 
all intersecting lines, and ride in a splendidly 



52 SOCIAL SANITY 

built car over as smooth a roadbed as you will 
find anywhere in the United States. 

Street-cars are not the only public conveni- 
ences in American cities. There are gas, tel- 
ephones, steam railroads, and electricity. How 
much do these things cost? The question is a 
question of science; the answer is a scientific 
answer. Then, too, there are the larger issues, 
— Who benefits by the tariff? What governs 
the price of beef? Who gains through increased 
land valuations? These and a score of other 
pressing public questions can be answered in 
terms of neither dogma nor tradition. They 
are scientific questions, demanding scientific ex- 
positions. 

Social sanity can be based on nothing less 
than a scientific attitude toward the facts of 
social life. By what other means may society 
protect and preserve itself than by determining 
in each case the true relations existing between 
various social things? 

Not once nor twice every year, a student 
comes to me railing against socialism. It will 
destroy the home; it will break down society; 
it is a menace to morals; it is organized rob- 
bery! To all of which I reply with the per- 
tinent question, — " What is socialism? " 

First the lad bluffs, next he side-steps, then 
he apologizes, and finally, driven to bay, he 
grudgingly admits that he never heard anyone 
explain the principles of socialism; that he 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 53 

never read a book by any leading socialist; 
that he never knew anybody who had read such 
a work; that his father had told him that so- 
cialists were dangerous to the social order ; that 
he had never talked with any really intelligent 
member of the socialist party, and that, in short, 
while he knew nothing about socialism or social- 
ists, he was thoroughly opposed to both. At 
this point, the average student, without more 
suggestion, will get a couple of books and read 
up on the matter before he attempts to discuss 
it further. 

The question of socialism, like the question 
of soil friability or of street-car fares, is first 
of all a question of fact. No fair-minded man 
attempts to discuss such matters, or any other 
matters of fact, until he is thoroughly conver- 
sant with the facts. In place of ' ' fair-minded ' ' 
read scientific, and the statement is still true, 
for the spirit of science requires the individual 
to confront all issues in a frank, open-minded 
way, with an entire willingness to accept the 
logical conclusions derived from things as they 
are. 

We laugh pityingly in the twentieth century 
when we hear that Christopher Columbus was 
forced to spend years arguing theories before 
he was allowed to test the facts. Was the 
earth round or flat? Would a ship, sailing off 
to the west, fall into a bottomless abyss? No 
one could answer because no one had tried, and 



54 SOCIAL SANITY 

although the learning of the fathers showed very 
clearly that Columbus and his brave followers 
must perish, they came back, safe and sound, 
after discovering a new shore. 

With what astonishment do we regard the 
assaults made upon the Darwinian theories im- 
mediately after their publication. Darwin him- 
self was the object of bitter personal at- 
tacks. Even so profound a thinker as Euskin 
sneered at this presumptuous meddler, who like 
a hazy comet was wagging his phosphorescent 
tail against the eternal stars. The world jeered, 
laughed, protested, expostulated. 

What had Darwin done? He had merely col- 
lected a group of facts, and, after viewing them 
in every possible light, had drawn certain con- 
clusions from them. Was he right or wrong? 
In order to decide that question, the beginner 
must take Darwin's facts, set beside them the 
facts at his disposal, analyze, deduce, and draw 
his conclusion. It is of no avail to call such a 
man an " atheist " or a " brutal scientist." 

Sixty years before, when Thomas Malthus 
published his essay on " The Principles of Pop- 
ulation," a similar controversy was raised. 
Malthus showed that the world was speeding 
toward over-population and consequent starva- 
tion. Instantly, he was proclaimed as an enemy 
of church and state, a stirrer up of discord, a 
profaner of God's beautiful world. Malthus re- 
plied, and the controversy raged for years. 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 55 

Malthus was wrong. He overlooked, or 
rather, lie under-estimated the potency of the 
preventive checks on the increase of popula- 
tion. Marriages are made at a later and later 
age. The birth-rate is being restricted in all 
sections of the population. These are facts, and 
they constitute the only effective answer to 
Malthus' propositions. 

Whatever the point at issue, if the affirmative 
be based on fact, — and no scientific controversy 
is tenable in which the affirmative is not based 
on fact, — the opposition can meet the issues in 
no other way than by proving the unsoundness 
of the opposing facts, or of the arguments built 
on them. A minister one day stood in his pulpit 
with " Science and Health " in his hands, for 
five minutes discussed its seven hundred closely 
written pages, and dismissed it for good. * ' Sci- 
ence and Health " has vulnerable points, but 
instead of assailing them, this man sought, by 
abuse and ridicule, to answer an elaborate state- 
ment. 

But surely these statements have no applica- 
tion to us. We are tolerant and broad-minded. 
You are no doubt convinced of that, yet how 
many of you who are in charge of educational 
institutions would follow the example of a city 
superintendent of schools, whose reply to any 
teacher with a new theory invariably is, — " Try 
it. There is no other way in which the truth 
or falsity of an educational theory can be dem- 



56 SOCIAL SANITY 

onstrated "t How many school superintendents 
would have referred to the educational authori- 
ties of the past two centuries and with fine 
phrases, and oft-spun arguments, dismissed the 
matter ! 

Yet, broadly speaking, the spirit of science 
has found a place in the wellspring of intelli- 
gent twentieth century thought. " Science is 
simply a higher development of common knowl- 
edge; and if Science is repudiated, all knowl- 
edge must be repudiated along with it. The 
extremest bigot will not suspect any harm in 
the observation that the sun rises earlier and 
sets later in summer than in winter; but will 
rather consider such an observation as a useful 
aid in fulfilling the duties of life. Well, As- 
tronomy is an organized body of kindred ob- 
servations, made with the greatest nicety. . . . 
That iron will rust in water, that wood will 
burn, that long-kept viands become putrid, the 
most timid sectarian will teach without alarm, 
as things useful to be known. But these are 
chemical truths. . . . And thus it is with all 
sciences. They severally germinate out of the 
experiences of daily life." * On these and sim- 
ilar experiences scientific deductions are based. 
All scientific method is the same, namety, — 

" 1. Observation of facts — including under 



* " First Principles," Herbert Spencer. New York : The Mac- 
millanCo., 1909. Pp. 14, 15. 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 57 

this head that artificial observation which is 
called experiment. 

" 2. That process of tying up similar facts 
into bundles which is called Comparison and 
Classification — the results of the process, the 
ticketed bundles being named General Proposi- 
tions. 

" 3. Deduction, which takes us from general 
propositions to the facts again, teaches us, if I 
may so say, to anticipate from the ticket what 
is inside the bundle. And finally — 

" 4. Verification, which is the process of 
ascertaining whether, in point of fact, our an- 
ticipation is a correct one." * 

Yet the scientist must not forget that u not 
only is there i a soul of goodness in things 
evil, but very generally also ' a soul of truth 
in things erroneous."! The spirit of science 
is a spirit of fair-mindedness, straight dealing, 
and truthfulness. The three necessary quali- 
fications for a scientist, Sir Michael Foster con- 
tends, are truthfulness, alertness, and courage. 
(1) " The seeker after truth must himself be 
truthful, — truthful with the truthfulness of na- 
ture." (2) "He must be alert of mind, ever 
on the watch, ready at once to lay hold of 
Nature's hint, however small, to listen to her 
whisper, however low." (3) " Scientific in- 

* u Science and Education, " Thomas H. Huxley. New York : 
D. Appleton & Co., 1901. P. 52. 
f " First Principles," op. cit. t p. 3. 



58 SOCIAL SANITY 

quiry has need of moral courage — not so much 
the courage which helps a man to face a sudden 
difficulty, as the courage of steadfast endur- 
ance." * 

In the same strain Huxley writes, — " If 
there is a young man of the present generation 
who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure 
himself that they are truths, let him come out 
with them, without troubling his head about the 
barking of the dogs of St. Eunulphus. ' Veritas 
praevalebit ' — some day; and even if she does 
not prevail in his time, he himself will be the 
better and the wiser for having tried to help 
her. And let him recollect that such great re- 
ward is full payment for all his labor and 
pains." t 

Meanwhile each passing year demonstrates 
more surely that the spirit of science which is 
possessing the modern world, is a broader spirit 
than any that has gone before. More tolerant, 
more human, more pregnant with hope for the 
future. Under it the old forces of ignorance and 
bigotry are ground into powder. In a few well 
chosen words does Shaw expound the whole phi- 
losophy. Larry, an Irishman, resident in Eng- 
land, is excusing himself for having failed to 
visit his father in eighteen years. ' ' Think of me 
and my father," he exclaims. " He's a Nation- 
alist and a Separatist. I'm a metallurgical 

*" Darwinism and Human Life," op. cit., p. 32. 
t " Man's Place in Nature," op. cit. t p. xi. 



THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE 59 

chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever 
else metallurgical chemistry may be it's not 
national. It's international. And my business 
and yours, as civil engineers, is to join coun- 
tries, not to separate them. The one real polit- 
ical conviction that our business has rubbed into 
us is that frontiers are hindrances, and flags 
confounded nuisances." * 

Let no one infer that speculative philosophy 
and religion have no place in the new scheme 
of things. Their field is ever broadening. 
They still direct the work of science, suggesting 
and leading into untried fields. Yet in cases, 
and their name is legion, where demonstration 
is possible, argument and protest have no place. 
Why judge, why condemn, why scoff, or sneer, 
or ridicule? Rather prove or disprove, for this 
is the spirit of science. 

Questions of fact are still questions of fact, 
though they overthrow our most cherished be- 
liefs. When an issue of fact and logic is raised, 
it can be answered in only one way — by fact and 
logic. Every issue which is susceptible of in- 
terpretation in these terms must be so inter- 
preted. Honesty, courage, fairness — such is the 
spirit of science. 

* « - John Bull's Other Island. " Act I. 



ni 

THE KINGDOM OF MAN 

The boundaries of man's power to direct the 
life stream are the boundaries of his kingdom. 
Within these limits, he is monarch; without, 
darkness and old night play havoc with his 
feeble powers. The kingdom of man is a grow- 
ing kingdom. Little by little, man, the mon- 
arch, has extended the boundaries of his domain, 
— conquering the land, the water, the lightning, 
and now, in these latter days, even the air. 
Is it too much to suppose that as time flies 
he will likewise take possession of the kingdoms 
of metaphysics, babbling in the language of 
the fourth dimension? Whatever the final out- 
come, no one can, after the achievements of 
the past five thousand years, presume to set 
bounds upon the things that man may do. 

The tools with which man must subdue his 
kingdom are the tools of science. Wherever 
the boundaries are extended, the work is done 
through the use of classified knowledge. The 
land, the water, the lightning, the air are 
brought to do man's bidding only through the 
use of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. 
Without science, man is an animal, hunted from 

60 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 61 

lair to lair by the larger and stronger brutes, 
uncertain of food or shelter. Armed with the 
power that science brings, — weapons, tools, fire, 
formulas, machines, and the forces of the earth, 
water and air, man passes as a conquering hero 
over the plains and through the jungles that 
formerly bespoke danger and death. Sorcery 
has played no part; the conjurer has been dis- 
pensed with; the ascertained facts alone remain. 
This knowledge, wielded at the behest of beliefs 
and of theories, has enabled man to win his 
throne, and proclaim himself the unchallenged 
lord of the beasts and birds, and of many of 
the forces of nature as well. 

A prejudice still lingers against the idea 
of a kingdom of man. The thought is so new, 
and its multitudinous applications through the 
realm of science have been made so recently, 
that it has scarcely been made a part of popular 
knowledge. Men, in times past, have worshiped 
the Kingdom of God, and they have trembled 
before the terrors of Satanic Despotism, but 
man's kingdom, until recent years, has never 
attracted their attention. Yet man has a king- 
dom, which upon due consideration appears to 
be in every way remarkable. 

Perhaps our forefathers had some ground for 
emphasizing the baser qualities of man, — in 
pointing out that he was " a mere worm," " the 
dust of the earth, " " a rude clod," and the like. 
Nevertheless, such careful natural scientists as 



62 SOCIAL SANITY 

Linnaeus, Buffon, Darwin, and Huxley have in- 
sisted, — apparently with excellent reason, — 
that there are certain well marked differences 
between the genus homo on the one hand, and 
worms, dust, and clods on the other. Indeed, 
a reading of these and other equally reputable 
authors, leads even the skeptic to the conclusion 
that man is not so base a creature, after all, 
but one of the most complex, best working or- 
ganisms of which nature affords a record. 
Furthermore, — and therein lies the truly signifi- 
cant part of the business, — man alone among 
the creatures of the earth has built himself a 
kingdom. No other being, so far as we know 
them, can utilize the forces of mighty Mother 
Nature, combining them and directing them to 
meet the varying needs of his life. 

Nature has produced, in man, a rival of no 
mean power. When she produced man, she sur- 
passed herself. He is her prodigy — perhaps, 
who knows, her Frankenstein as well. In him 
Edwin Markham sees, first of all, the contem- 
plative spirit: — 

" Out of the deep and endless universe 
There came a greater Mystery, a Shape, 
A something sad, inscrutable, august — 
One to confront the worlds and question them J y 

Markham thus venerates the spirit of philoso- 
phy. He might have emphasized, with equal 
justice, the spirit of science. 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 63 

Whether nature is concerned about man we 
cannot tell, but we do know that, among his 
own kind, he has been the object of no little 
analysis and speculation. His origin, his na- 
ture, his power, his virtue, his grandeur, and 
his destiny have been the source of endless dis- 
cussion. In the realm of science this discussion 
has led to careful studies and comparisons. 
Man has been taken to pieces, treated chem- 
ically, and subjected to tests psychological 
and anatomical. The conclusion of the matter 
lies in a series of explanations which show, more 
and more clearly with the lapse of time, the 
qualifications which enable man to assert his 
royal prerogatives over the animate world. 

Nowhere, perhaps, have man's physical qual- 
ifications for kingship been better set forth than 
in that most readable treatise by Thomas Hux- 
ley on ' l The Nature of Man. ' ' Man, an ambi- 
dextrous bipe4, to use the phraseology of Car- 
lyle, stands erect on his feet, — almost never 
depending upon his hands for locomotion. This 
upright posture, although its importance has 
probably been greatly over-emphasized, has cer- 
tain marked advantages over the horizontal pos- 
ture of most animals, and even over the posture 
of those apes, like the orang-outang, the chim- 
panzee, and the gorilla, which, while standing 
on their feet, depend upon their hands for aid 
in locomotion. The man standing firmly on his 
feet, his hands free for use in offense or defense, 



64 SOCIAL SANITY 

possesses a striking advantage over all other 
members of the brute creation. 

The real anatomical superiority of man over 
the other creatures lies in two directions, — in 
the first place, he has one finger on each hand 
(the thumb) set at right angles to the remain- 
der of the hand and operating independently 
in such a way that its end may come in contact 
with the ends of all of the other fingers. This 
structure in the hand, which enables man to 
grasp " 'twixt thumb and finger," places him 
on a vantage ground occupied, otherwise, by 
only a few of the higher apes. All four feet 
of most mammals are built around a bony struc- 
ture, like that of the human foot, which must 
move in unison or not at all. The hand of man 
with its thumb is the exception, and it is this 
exception, coupled with man's second advantage 
— a large frontal development of the brain — 
which has enabled him to build his kingdom. 

The frontal lobe of the brain apparently con- 
tains its administrative offices. Like the super- 
intendent's office in a factory the frontal lobe 
co-ordinates the mental functions and powers. 
Where the frontal lobe is destroyed, as it has 
been in a few rare cases, the man loses his 
sense of proportions and values, failing, largely, 
in the control of his actions. Couple these two 
things together, — the hand with its thumb, and 
the brain with its elaborate department of ad- 
ministration, — and in the creature possessing 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 65 

both there lies the potentiality of world mas- 
tery. 

The mastering of the world? Nay, more, the 
mastering of two worlds, — first, the world of 
external things; second, the world of animate 
life lying within man himself. Thus has arisen 
a man having dominion over the fowls of the 
air, the beasts of the field, and the gold and 
silver under a thousand hills; thus has arisen 
likewise man having dominion over himself, 
shaping, in large measure, his own destiny and 
the destiny of the race of which he is a 
part. 

Eeview, for a moment, the history of man's 
declaration of independence from dogma and 
tradition during the past half-dozen centuries. 
Society was ruled, during the Middle Ages, by 
arbitrary laws, enacted by the church, or by 
the state, acting (theoretically) for the church. 
The light of the semi-democratic civilization of 
Greece and Eome had faded from the political 
horizon. Despotism, the patron saint of the 
time, reigned supreme with Fate, her next of 
kin. Here and there a bold spirit arose, con- 
tending with authority, questioning theological 
dogma, and calling men to thought and freedom. 
Cells and gibbets harbored many such. Above 
them, the bulwarks of social tradition loomed 
stolidly, proclaiming abroad the noisome doc- 
trine that, while a true believer might slay 
twenty Mohammedans in the name of Jesus, 



66 SOCIAL SANITY 

he might not think one original thought in the 
name of truth. 

Yet the light broke. From questioning the 
infallibility of the church, men turned to ques- 
tion the infallibility of the Scripture. They 
would at least read for themselves! So theo- 
logical dogma was thrust aside here and there, 
by the braver hearts who began to ask of all 
things : — 

1. What is it? 

2. Why is it? 

3. How can we employ it for our advantage ? 
Similar questions had arisen in classical days, 
but the age of faith had overshadowed them. 
Now they were asked again, with redoubled 
vigor. 

Gradually the answers were formulated. The 
first question resulted in classification, which is 
the foundation of constructive thought. The 
question " Why? " gave rise to evolutionary 
science. The world, demanding fact as well as 
faith, was replacing theological dogma by sci- 
entific deduction. 

Although it was freed from theological 
dogma, the progressive thought of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries was still domi- 
nated by the idea that laws of some kind were 
a human necessity. The social atmosphere still 
tingled with the spirit of past despotism. 
Hence, without a protest, men passed from the 
dominion of theological to the dominion of nat- 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 67 

ural law. Even the ablest thinkers sought for 
principles which, like Newton's law of gravi- 
tation, would underlie and control all phenom- 
ena. The protest, " Back to nature," was 
merely a demand that the world leap from the 
frying-pan of theological absolutism, into the 
fire of nature-tyranny. Yet the thought of the 
eighteenth century teems with this demand. 
The Physiocrats voiced it; the natural theo- 
logians preached it; Eousseau popularized it. 
Its logical flower was the French Eevolution, 
which was a blind effort to pour the new wine 
of emancipated thought from the old bottles 
of political despotism into almost equally nar- 
row bottles of political pedantry. In the process 
much wine was lost. " Natural law " dogma 
bound the thought of eighteenth century think- 
ers in exactly the same way that the ' i divine 
right ' ' dogma had bound the thought of their 
ancestors. 

Nowhere is the transition better shown than 
in the development of the new world science 
of economics. Economics was born in the 
eighteenth century, — born of natural theology 
and physiocratic philosophy. Hereditarily, eco- 
nomics suffered from in-breeding. Environ- 
mentally, it was hedged in by the narrowest 
of narrow concepts — that of subjection to 
M higher powers." 

Was economics to become a science? Adam 
Smith and his contemporaries hoped that it 



68 SOCIAL SANITY 

was. How well marked, then, was the path? 
All sciences were founded on natural laws. If 
economics was to be raised into the hierarchy 
of sciences, a great natural law must be found 
which would explain economic phenomena. The 
economists, therefore, applied the tests of sci- 
ence to their doctrines in order to establish 
their scientific nature. To the question, " What 
is it? " they replied, " A science of Wealth." 
To the question, " Why is it? " they answered, 
" Because of intelligent self-interest," " the 
law of supply and demand," " competition," 
and the like. The third question they did not 
ask because the eighteenth century accepted and 
obeyed nature's laws instead of trying to utilize 
them for human advantage. 

Nevertheless, the third question must be an- 
swered. Of all things men will ultimately ask, 
" How can we employ these for our advan- 
tage? " The basis of the answer was laid in 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when 
free thought had largely escaped from theolog- 
ical dogma; when knowledge had ceased to be 
the right of the few, and had become the privi- 
lege of all. In the eighteenth century the ques- 
tion was asked of government. Men challenged 
the divine right of kings, and, on both sides 
of the Atlantic, democracy replaced monarchy. 
During the nineteenth century, experimental 
science asked the same question of natural law; 
established the power of human thought; forged 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 69 

the tools with which the work must be done; 
and bent immutable nature to the service of 
man through applied science. Thus knowledge, 
government, and natural phenomena have been 
turned to human service. The twentieth cen- 
tury voices a demand that economics undergo 
the same process of transformation from a sci- 
ence which serves laws to a science which serves 
society. 

On the one hand, science has demonstrated 
that all so-called laws may be employed to serve 
men, or else, if their influence is harmful, coun- 
teracted and offset. Gravitation has ceased to 
be an enemy; lightning holds few terrors; the 
waterfall is harnessed; the plague stayed; the 
desert blooms; time and space have lost their 
vastness; men have triumphed everywhere 
through the mastery of human thought. What- 
ever laws economics may depend upon are no 
more changeless than these overwhelmed laws 
of nature. 

We are no more subject to the laws of eco- 
nomics than our ancestors were subject to the 
laws of military tactics ; than we are subject to 
the laws of education ; or than our descendants 
will be subject to the laws of the sanitary sci- 
ence which we are creating. There are formulas 
of thought called " laws " in all sciences, but 
Napoleon overthrew and remade the laws of 
military tactics; Froebel restated the laws of 
education; and Pasteur created the science of 



70 SOCIAL SANITY 

sanitation. There is an economic lawgiver — 
man, who can unmake or remake that which 
he has made. 

The economists in the past have asked 
" What? " and " Why? " of economic phenom- 
ena. The time has now come when they must 
face the third question and discover how eco- 
nomics may be made to serve mankind. The 
discovery that opportunity largely shapes the 
life of the average man, determining whether 
he shall be happy or miserable, has led to an 
insistence that the economists part company 
with the ominous pictures of an over-populated, 
starving world, prostrate before the throne of 
" competition," " psychic value," " individ- 
ual initiative," " private property," or some 
other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, 
straightforward language how they may com- 
bine, reshape, or overcome the laws and utilize 
them as a blessing instead of enduring them 
as a burden and a curse. The day has dawned 
when economists must explain that welfare must 
be put before wealth ; that the iron law of wages 
may be shattered by a minimum wage law ; that 
universal over-population is being prevented by 
a universal restriction in the birth-rate; that 
overwork, untimely death, and a host of other 
economic maladjustments will disappear before 
an educated, legislating public opinion ; and that 
combination and co-operation may be employed 
to silence forever the savage demands of un- 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 71 

restricted competition. In short, the econo- 
mists, if they are to justify their existence, must 
provide a theory which will enable the average 
man, by co-operating with his fellows, to bear 
more easily the burden and heat of the day. 

How shall this be? What relief may eco- 
nomics — " the dismal science " — afford? Per- 
haps the matter can best be stated in an analogy 
suggested by Euskin. Suppose that five men 
were to take a tract of a thousand acres for 
the purpose of running a general farm. 
Learned in the art of scientific agriculture, these 
men provide the necessary tools, equipment, 
fertilizers, and seeds, prepare the ground, sow 
the crops, harvest the grain, potatoes, fruit, 
and vegetables, and take them to market. 
Where they find their land too wet — they drain 
it ; if, perchance, the tract is too dry, they irri- 
gate; and if a test shows that a certain field 
needs lime, they promptly apply lime. These 
men are farming the land. They do not wait 
for the land to produce a living for them, but 
instead, they use the land in every conceivable 
way. 

Suppose that, instead of fertilizing, irrigat- 
ing, and draining, these men, upon discovering 
that one plot was very fertile, farmed only that 
plot, leaving the less fertile parts of the farm 
untilled; suppose that, when water stood in a 
field, they invoked the aid of physics and mathe- 
matics, ascertained that this field was low, and 



72 SOCIAL SANITY 

therefore bound to be wet; suppose that they 
abandoned a hill plot which would not raise 
tobacco without even attempting to ascertain 
whether it would grow buckwheat; suppose that 
after venturing timidly to try a few minor ex- 
periments, these men, discouraged and forlorn, 
should assemble around a stone, and, raising 
their hands to the sky, should beseech some 
higher power to make water run up-hill or 
tobacco grow on buckwheat land. Or, instead 
of praying, imagine their hopeless, hang-dog 
air as they gazed dejectedly over their thousand 
acres, exclaiming, — " Alas, the law of gravita- 
tion makes our lowland wet; tobacco will not 
grow on the highland; yonder field contains no 
lime for our clover crop, and even the cattle 
in the hill pasture suffer from lack of water." 

1 * What a picture ! ' ' you cry, contemptu- 
ously. " What sane men would talk so? " you 
demand. " The illustration approaches the 
ridiculous. Beseech a power? Bemoan the law 
of gravitation? Fiddlesticks! Irrigate, drain, 
lime, water, fertilize, and the land will bring 
forth in abundance.' ' 

True, true, but listen! Ninety million people, 
some of them intelligent men and women, living 
in one of the most fertile regions of the whole 
earth, possessed of boundless natural resources, 
of knowledge, and of energy, have suffered for 
a century from devastating industrial depres- 
sions; have watched little children work their 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 73 

fingers raw in the coal breakers ; have witnessed 
an exploitation of women that has required two 
hundred thousand of them to sell their bodies ; 
have tolerated sodden misery, poverty, vice, 
criminality ; have permitted one small group in 
the community to possess itself of the natural 
resources on which all depend, and to exact a 
monopoly price, from all, for the use of those 
resources; and now, after generations of this 
grewsome motion picture, these sane, strong 
men and women raise their hands to a higher 
power, or slink dejectedly into their caricature 
homes, making scarcely an effort to throttle 
their taskmasters — Hunger and Emulation — or 
to stay the hand of the grim reaper who annu- 
ally sends seven hundred thousand of them to 
premature graves. 

Irrigate ! Drain ! Lime ! Fertilize ! Aye, 
farmer, do these things, and you will reap a 
plenteous harvest. You possess the knowledge 
and the tools, — then bend enthusiastically to 
your task! 

Educate ! Legislate ! Eeorganize ! Adjust ! 
Aye, citizen, do these things and you will gain 
a satisfying livelihood. You possess the knowl- 
edge, the wealth, the tools, — then bend enthusi- 
astically to your task! 

Man has heard the behests of great, moving, 
virile ideas, and ceasing to bow before difficul- 
ties, he has swept forward like a conquering 
monarch, establishing his kingdom, destroying, 



74 SOCIAL SANITY 

with the blazing torch of science the superstruc- 
ture of tradition and bigotry; holding in his 
hand the tool, mechanics, and directing his ac- 
tivities by the exercise of judgment and reason 
he has built a newer, nobler structure than the 
one which he destroyed. 

Mechanics ! That one word lies at the foun- 
dation of all civilization. The kingdom of man 
is built on mechanics, and since man is the only 
creature with mechanical possibilities, it neces- 
sarily follows that man alone could have con- 
structed such a kingdom. 

The beavers! the beavers! We have forgot- 
ten the beavers, and the ants, the bees, the 
birds, the rodents. They all build, and in the 
case of beavers and ants, build in a fashion 
truly marvelous. Yet, think — they have no 
thumb and no tools ! Apparently, they are in- 
capable of making or of using tools. Man's 
mechanical genius has turned toolward, and it 
is on tools that his kingdom depends. He has 
been well called " the tool-using animal." 
From the time when he employed one stone to 
shape another, until the time when one tool 
measures, mixes, sorts, and bakes his loaves of 
bread for him, all without the touch of his hand, 
man has been building his kingdom — building 
it with the tools which his mechanical genius 
enables him to devise. 

Nay, you protest, but it is not in tools alone 
that man's supremacy lies. No, not in tools 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 75 

proper, — not as you would say exactly tools, — 
unless you take " tools " in its broadest aspect, 
and include in it the tool of language, and 
those signs which have gradually become let- 
ters and numbers. They, too, are tools — de- 
vices for increasing the effectiveness of human 
thought. 

Whatever view one may hold concerning bi- 
ologic evolution, however opposed one may be 
to the concept of the growth of species, — there 
can be no question as to man's evolution of the 
tool. Primitive tribes still use clubs and stones ; 
even the bow and arrow — a tool used at a com- 
paratively early time — is unknown to the abo- 
rigines of Australia. The tool is a product of 
evolution. Printing presses, locomotives, sew- 
ing machines, double-bitted, tempered steel axes 
were not made in a year, nor were they found 
already made. Under the eyes of our grand- 
fathers and of our fathers, they have been cre- 
ated — created by the combination of mechanical 
ability and scientific knowledge. The mechan- 
ical ability was founded in the tools which man 
had made ; the scientific knowledge was set down 
and accumulated by means of letters and fig- 
ures. 

No one man created a tool, but each, labor- 
ing perhaps for a lifetime, made some slight 
improvement in the thing which his ancestors 
had handed to him. What untold ages may have 
elapsed between the rude stick, broken by brute 



76 SOCIAL SANITY 

force from a tree, and used as a weapon, and 
the spear, with carefully made handle and stone 
or metal head attached! We cannot tell the 
years in numbers — we can merely surmise them, 
yet they passed. With what weary steps did 
the savage reach the throw-stick, the boom- 
erang, the blow- gun, and the bow and arrow! 
Yet these are some of the simplest tools 
which man has made. No less significant is 
the evolution of the use of fire, first for warmth, 
or for cooking, then for such industrial uses 
as the smelting of metals and the manufacture 
of glass, and finally for power. Civilization 
has been built with fire. Consider the evolution 
of the wheel. A simple device which you take 
for granted, yet until it was thought out pack- 
animals and man's shoulders were the only 
methods of carrying. With the wheel for trans- 
portation, came the demand for roads — first 
wagon roads and now railroads. All of these 
things have come slowly, bit by bit, into the 
consciousness of mankind. With their coming 
has come civilization — the product of man's 
handiwork. 

About many of these developments we must 
surmise, but in our own times we see creations 
surpassing in their marvelousness aught that 
has preceded them. It is little more than a 
century since Benjamin Franklin was playing 
electricity with kite-strings and keys. The elec- 
tricity of Franklin's time was the plaything of 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 77 

men of science. In a brief hundred years — a 
passing moment in the history of the human 
race — electricity has entered every branch of 
science and industry, revolutionizing transpor- 
tation, communication, power methods, and 
forms of amusement and recreation, medicine, 
and a thousand other things — and electricity is 
but one of scores of wonders of the modern 
mechanical world. 

We know these things, yet we often fail to 
recognize in them the all-important fact that 
all are the outcome of evolution. Each has been 
made piece by piece, here a little and there a 
little. Though some occasional scientist like 
Pasteur or Edison contributes many original 
ideas, the fact remains that his contributions 
are based on those of his predecessors, and that 
they constitute one link in the line of discovery 
which has led to the thing which we look upon 
as completed and as wonderful. Yet, continu- 
ing, what may not the future hold in store? 
Even the most prolific and original genius can- 
not rise out of the life stream of ideas, dis- 
coveries, and creations, of which he is a part. 
He can direct the stream though, adding to it, 
meanwhile, elements which it never contained 
before. 

The contributions which the past has made to 
civilization are wonderful. Yet, continuing for 
the next five thousand years the rate of de- 
velopment which has characterized the past 



78 SOCIAL SANITY 

five thousand, especially the past two hundred 
years, what may the future not hold in store? 

There is no ascertained limit to the growth 
of mechanics, there are no set boundaries to 
science, there is therefore no known restriction 
on the kingdom of man, because human reason 
may work new wonders in each new century. 
Better than all, man's wisdom rests on an ac- 
cumulated knowledge of the ages which man 
can hand down, from generation to generation, 
in his books. 

The communication of ideas by means of 
symbols which might be likened to mortar, ce- 
menting the triumphs of one age upon those 
of another, is likewise the product of an evolu- 
tionary change, — a current in the life stream 
of the world. Walk into Central Park and lay 
an evening paper against the foot of the obelisk. 
The contrast is grotesque, yet the obelisk is 
one tiny step, carefully executed at an enormous 
expenditure of human effort, in the develop- 
ment of language. On all of its great stone 
surface there is less than we can to-day put 
in a single newspaper, book, or magazine. 
Since the obelisk was chiseled, men have learned 
to employ an alphabet, to use paper, to print 
with types and to make cheap books. 

Whatever the origin of language, ages un- 
doubtedly elapsed between the use of spoken 
and the use of written speech, and we know 
that between the use of writing and the use 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 79 

of printing — the popularizer of knowledge — 
ages more passed. The education of which 
we are so proud is the product of phonetic 
speech, of writing with symbols, and of printing 
with movable type. The work of centuries at 
last bears its fruition in the text-book, with 
its half-tones and its printing. If it was true 
in Solomon's time that " much study is a weari- 
ness to the flesh, and of the making of books 
there is no end, M how much more horrified 
would the good sage have been could he have 
gazed upon twenty million school children, 
many of them bespectacled, poring over hun- 
dreds of millions of books, while, from every 
hand, the printers, publishers, editors, and 
authors grind out millions more. 

The human race moves, after ages of effort, 
along a life stream which has been trans- 
formed by the hands and brains of man. 
Man, the reasoning being, aided by mechan- 
ics, has built a new world. Nature has never 
duplicated the work of man. The effort is his 
and the glory : the throne is his and the obliga- 
tions of kingship. In this last century man 
has set upon the throne of his kingdom, himself 
— the democracy. Will it then prove fit for the 
task of government? Can it control this won- 
der-world of the ages? As civilization sweeps 
forward and upward, can man guide its hurry- 
ing course? Literally, can man make out of 
his own image and likeness a ruler worthy to 



80 SOCIAL SANITY 

govern Ms kingdom? Therein lies his second 
great task. Like the task of creating civiliza- 
tion it must be based upon the word of science. 
Like that task too, it must move from the known 
of the present into the unknown of the future, 
creating, with each passing year, men and 
women more competent to direct advancing civ- 
ilization. 

Nietzsche writes of this second great task 
of man, ' i I teach you beyond man. All hitherto 
have created something beyond themselves.' ' 
11 In your children's children ye shall make 
amend for being your fathers' children. Thus 
ye shall redeem all that is past." 

The self-centered egotist will find that the 
vibrations of Nietzsche's philosophy grate un- 
pleasantly on his ear. He had regarded him- 
self as the finality, now he learns, perhaps, for 
the first time, that he is not Omega, nor even 
Alpha, — that he is naught, in effect, but an 
infinitesimal atom. It is a disquieting thought, 
this relegation of the lord of creation to a sec- 
ondary place in the infinite scheme of things. 
Yet, after all, " What, then, are we? " 

Nietzsche replies with brutal directness that 
we are milestones, that we are signboards, point- 
ing toward progress, that we are half-way 
houses, built, as if by accident, on the path 
which leads to the super-race. " What is great 
in man," the brilliant German exclaims, " is 
that he is a bridge and not a goal." We of to- 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 81 

day are a part of the structure on which is 
erected the superstructure of to-morrow. Like 
the coral insect, we lay down our lives in the 
foundation of the present that the future may 
rise, palm crowned, above the white and green 
of the lapping water. 

Man may be no more, yet there is that within 
his soul which would transcend this involuntary 
submission to a process, — something which 
would rise above the dead level of fatalistic 
doubt, declaring that while it is true that the 
twentieth century man is a bridge — or perhaps, 
better, one plank in a bridge — connecting the 
Alpha and Omega of the human species, he is 
as much more than the mere passive agent as 
the bridge-builder is more than the bridge. For 
man differs from the bridge in this, that with 
deliberate consciousness he is building the 
bridge to the Omega of the race. We are the 
bridge, — we are also the bridge-builders. 

Anyone who has seen a cantilever construc- 
tion in process of erection will appreciate the 
thought. Tied with iron bands to a foundation 
erected on the bank, the great structure projects 
out, sheer over the water, without any apparent 
means of support, while piece by piece the 
girders and beams are added. Yet, it is not in 
the bridge itself that we glory, so much as in 
the fact that we have the power to erect such 
a structure. 

Man has always been a bridge, and a bridge- 



82 SOCIAL SANITY 

builder too. Since he learned that a connection 
exists between sex and reproduction, he has 
built consciously, though never so badly. To- 
day, more scientific in our knowledge, we may 
deliberately determine the character of the hu- 
man bridge which we construct. 

If modern science speaks correctly — and we 
have no reason at all to doubt its testimony 
in this matter — the racial qualities are handed 
down from one generation to the next through 
the germ-plasm or life stream of the human 
species. While it is practically impossible to 
alter the characteristics of a germ cell, it is 
possible to influence the future, radically, by 
the choice of parents, because on the character 
of the two parental germ cells depends abso- 
lutely the character of the offspring. Within 
each germ cell lie a group of microscopic lines 
called chromosomes, which contain the charac- 
teristics of the germ cell, and hence of the future 
being. When the new organism is formed from 
the union of the two parental cells, the lines in 
the parental cells group themselves in pairs, — 
twelve pairs in the human species, — and this 
grouping determines the characteristics of the 
offspring. 

The Hebrew woman utters a glad cry, — " I 
have gotten a man from the Lord." A new 
beam has been laid — a new unit in the completed 
bridge of the human race. Is the beam well 
tempered? Strong? Elastic? Rightly shaped ? 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 83 

Ask that child's parents, for upon them and 
upon them only rests the responsibility for its 
qualities. They are among the bridge-builders. 

Every marriage means potential bridge ma- 
terial. Will this new supply be structurally 
safe? Such a question can be clearly, and nay, 
almost conclusively, answered by an analysis 
of three or four preceding generations on either 
side. 

Such matters are scarcely open even to quib- 
bling, to-day. Eobust, healthy, virile parentage 
and grand-parentage will almost surely mean 
vigorous, energetic offspring, while defective 
parental stock shows itself in the offspring in 
a way more or less predictable. Perhaps the 
Mendelian formula does not apply with abso- 
lute precision. What then? We still have on 
the one hand long lines of able men and women, 
exemplified in the Hohenzollern family in Ger- 
many, and the Jonathan Edwards family in the 
United States, while, on the other hand, inves- 
tigation shows, in scores of cases, long lines 
of defect such as is exhibited by the Zero family 
abroad, and by the Jukes at home. 

Why clarify crystal spring water? Any man 
who has dealt with genetics in any form will 
assure you that parental ability or parental 
defect are handed on from one generation to 
the next with marvelous precision. 

How optimistic is Whitman when he thinks 
of the coming race! " I will make the most 



84 SOCIAL SANITY 

splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon," 
he writes. In like lines does Yeats refer to 
" The great race that is to come." Ruskin 
believes that " There is as yet no ascertained 
limit to the noblesse of person and mind which 
the human creature may attain." And Ellen 
Key voices a prophecy of " A state of culture 
which will be that of the depths, not, as here- 
tofore, of the surface alone ; a stage which will 
not be merely a culture through mankind, but 
a culture of mankind." 

Genus homo, bridge-builder, incorporated in 
the form of civilization, equipped with modern 
scientific knowledge, and supplied by nature 
with the tools for his task — nay, compelled by 
nature to perform the task unless he is willing 
to sacrifice the right of self-perpetuation. 
Genus homo — the bridge-builder to the future 
— drawn pell-mell by the storm of forces rag- 
ing within him to this perilous task, erecting 
the structure of the human race. Tell us, O 
philosopher, as you stand over the abyss, gaz- 
ing out into the unknown, where shall we lay 
our next span? You too, scientist, testing the 
materials as they are brought forward, tell 
us, tell us! Will they stand the strain? After 
all, you can but prophesy, but whether we will 
or no we are building. Let us hope that the 
philosopher advises well. Let us believe that 
the scientist finds the materials testing high, 
else philosophy and science alike may crash 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 85 

together into the great unknown, tumbling to 
destruction with the struggling remnants of 
Western civilization. 

Will man rule sagely and grandly in his two 
kingdoms? Can he conquer genus homo, as he 
has conquered electricity, light, and the lesser 
creatures, — discarding the qualities which lead 
away from his goal, and amplifying those 
which he can advantageously employ? He has 
given the scepter to his descendants, the de- 
mocracy. Are they of a stock which can wield 
scepters? Is Emerson right when he says: — 

" When the statesmen plow 
Furrows for the wheat, 
When the Church is social worth, 
When the State house is the hearth, 
Then the perfect State is come, 
The republican at home." * 

We believe so! Confident in our power to 
make a king as we have made a kingdom, we 
press forward to the task. 

Yet the brain of the democracy must be vig- 
orous and its hand supple, if it is to rule suc- 
cessfully. This is no sinecure, — this rule over 
the kingdom of man. Hear E. Ray Lankester : — 

1 ' This is, indeed, the definite purpose of my 
discourse: to point out that civilized man has 
proceeded so far in his interference with extra- 

* Essay on " Politics." 



86 SOCIAL SANITY 

human nature, has produced for himself and 
the living organisms associated with him such 
a special state of things by his rebellions against 
natural selection and his defiance of Nature's 
pre-human dispositions, that he must either go 
on and acquire firmer control of the conditions 
or perish miserably by the vengeance certain 
to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great 
affairs. We may indeed compare civilized man 
to a successful rebel against Nature who by 
every step forward renders himself liable to 
greater and greater penalties, and so cannot 
afford to pause or fail in one single step. Or 
again, we may think of him as the heir to a 
vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been 
finally educated so as to fit him to take posses- 
sion of his property, and is at length left alone 
to do his best; he has willfully abrogated, in 
many important respects, the laws of his mother 
Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto gov- 
erned; he has gained some power and advan- 
tage by so doing, but is threatened on every 
hand by dangers and disasters hitherto re- 
strained: no retreat is possible — his only hope 
is to control, as he knows that he can, the 
sources of these dangers and disasters. They 
already make him wince; how long will he sit 
listening to the fairy-tales of bis boyhood and 
shrink from manhood's task? " * 

* "Nature and Man," E. K. Lankester. Oxford : Clarendon 
Press, 1905. P. 27. 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 87 

Yet, standing as we do, facing the past, and 
contemplating the present, we are forced again 
to the conclusion that civilization is a Becom- 
ing, not a Being. Under our very eyes, while 
we gaze upon it, our kingdom is transformed, — 
the motor races ahead of the horse, the aero- 
plane glides into the air, the moving picture 
takes us among the wild beasts of the African 
jungle, the voice of the prima donna resounds 
under our humble roof, the switches, interlock- 
ing automatically, protect us as we speed away 
into the night, the grocer offers us string-beans 
and strawberries in February, and industry, 
burning and whirring, pours into our hands a 
flood of things which our minds have never been 
taught to covet. Civilization is becoming, grow- 
ing, changing, and whether we like it or not, 
we are a part of the change which is occur- 
ring. 

How idle to kick against the pricks! How 
profane to imagine that you or I, one micro- 
scopic unit in a vast moving stream, can stem 
the tide by standing still and gazing at the past ! 
Imagine a soldier in the front rank of a charg- 
ing battalion of cavalry, stopping his horse and 
standing still. Still? He would be swept to 
destruction. 

Three conservative Elders controlled the pol- 
icy of a church in a small country town. Each 
year the spirit of unrest grew. Each year it 
became evident that if this church was to hold 



88 SOCIAL SANITY 

its congregation, it must march in step with 
the times, nevertheless the Elders remained 
obdurate and the church stood still. These 
Elders were, as the name suggests, old men. 
In their moments of crass optimism, they im- 
agined that they might hold on forever and 
prevent the spirit of change, which was steal- 
ing into every other church, from gaining an 
entrance into theirs; but in their saner times, 
they remembered that, all flesh being grass, 
their turn would surely come, and their hearts 
told them that no sooner were they gone and 
rid of, than the progressive element in the 
church would adopt every one of the reforms 
against which they had fought for so many 
years. The plight was maddening. They must 
go ; they could not take the church with them ; so 
that, at last, with the assistance of the great 
reaper, their enemies would triumph. In their 
hopeless rage, they gnashed their teeth. Per- 
haps, following the suggestion of Job's com- 
forter, they cursed God for having made such 
a mess of things. They had never learned that 
the world is a progression, and that every insti- 
tution in the world — even the church — must re- 
adjust itself to the changing times. 

"When the English weavers stormed the early 
factories, tearing out the machinery and de- 
manding that the handicraft system of industry 
be retained, they were building a dam across 
the stream of progress. In their time, the 



THE KINGDOM OF MAN 89 

stream was running very strong, and their 
dam was like a wisp of straw in a spring 
freshet. 

Sometimes these dams have held for a time. 
The Feudal System, for example, stayed in 
France until the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, when it was swept aside by a great rev- 
olution. The Caste System remains in India, 
even to-day, although the mutterings from be- 
neath now threaten its existence. Time was 
when the Feudal System and the Caste System 
benefited mankind. In their inception they were 
more desirable types of social organization than 
the type which preceded them, but, in the course 
of advance, civilization has swept beyond them 
and they go down under the tide of progress. 

The part is not greater than the whole. No 
segment of the human race can stand perma- 
nently in the path which leads toward the wel- 
fare of the majority. Social structure always 
has and always will change in response to the 
immutable law that socially advantageous insti- 
tutions always replace those which are of less 
social advantage. 

Meanwhile we as the present rulers of the 
kingdom of man bend earnestly to the task 
before us. The stream of life we see. Its direc- 
tion, its control, we take upon ourselves as 
our fathers lay down the burden. How shall 
we meet the responsiblities of our kingship? 
How shape the present, and mold the future? 



90 SOCIAL SANITY 

The past has spoken; the present is heard; the 
future waits, a limitless silence. Life has de- 
creed that we shall fill it with the sounds and 
with the echoes from voices. Are our children 
not entitled to uplifting harmonies? 



IV 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 

What spirit shall breathe in man as he looks 
upon his kingdom? How shall he regard the 
eddying, swirling life-stream-current of which 
he is a part? What thought shall be upper- 
most in his mind as he wields the scepter of his 
authority? Some vision, some forward look, 
there must be, else the people perish. Some- 
times the two angles from which life may be 
looked upon are described as pessimism and 
optimism. 

Are you an optimist? If you are, you believe 
in the kingdom of man, in the widening of its 
borders, in the deepening of its thought, in the 
strengthening of its feeling and of its vision. 
Do you believe that, through science, man may 
direct the life stream of his existence and of 
the civilization to which he belongs? If you 
are an optimist, you believe in the possibilities 
of the future. 

Are you a pessimist? If you are, you have 
no faith in the kingdom of man, in its extent 
or quality. You have no faith in man ? s ability to 
direct the life stream. You who are pessimists 
believe in the possibilities of the past. The 

91 



92 SOCIAL SANITY 

optimist is a near-king, for his optimism rests 
upon his potential achievement, his possible 
greatness. The pessimist is of the earth, earthy, 
failing in aspiration and in the spirt of light. 
Hear Victor Hugo, the great-minded optimist 
of French literature, as he finds hope, even 
while looking into the shadows which enshroud 
many corners of the kingdom of man. " And 
yet some of those who follow the social clinics 
shake their heads at times, and the strongest, 
the most tender, and the most logical have 
their hours of despondency. Will the future 
arrive? It seems as if we may almost ask this 
question on seeing so much terrible shadow. 
There, in a somber face to face meeting of the 
egotist, we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of 
a caste education, appetite growing with intoxi- 
cation, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of 
suffering which in some goes so far as an aver- 
sion from the sufferers, an implacable satis- 
faction, and the feeling of self so swollen that 
it closes the soul. In the wretched we find 
covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others 
successful, the profound bounds of the human 
wild beast at satisfaction, and hearts full of 
mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and impure and 
simple ignorance. Must we still raise our eyes 
to heaven? Is the luminous point which we 
notice there one of those which die out? The 
ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the 
depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and bril- 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 93 

Kant, but surrounded by all those great black 
menaces monstrously collected around it; for 
all that, though, it is in no more danger than a 
star in the yawning throat of the clouds." * 

Men may not overlook the shadows which 
lurk on this side and on that. Misery, crime, 
disease, poverty, vice, bespeak their own hid- 
eous possibilities too clearly to be forgotten. 
Yet even in their delineation, man may read 
the uncompleted record of his own greatness— 
the record of that which might have been and 
is not : the record of that which still may be. 

Pessimism is the philosophy of the old 
world; optimism is the philosophy of the new. 
Pessimism is a philosophy of misery and deficit ; 
optimism is a philosophy of joy and surplus. 
Pessimism is the last wail of the jail bird on 
his way to the gallows; optimism is the song 
of the man who feels in his soul that he can 
behave himself well enough to keep out of jail. 
Pessimism means stagnation; optimism means 
joyous activity. 

Are you a pessimist? Is your golden age in 
the past? Must men walk with the head al- 
ways over the shoulder? Is there nothing in 
front save oblivion or the pangs of hell fire? 
Are we destined to be broken on the wheel of 
fortune whether or no? If you answer these 
questions in the affirmative, surely you are a 
pessimist. 

* ■■ Les Miserables," Part IV, Ch. ccv. 



94 SOCIAL SANITY 

The old world was a world of pessimism. 
The savage lives in a state of constant terror. 
On every side the forces of nature present over- 
whelming odds to his cowering soul. He sac- 
rifices, propitiates, hopes, and fears. He is " in 
the fell grip of circumstance," so firmly that 
by the utmost effort he cannot move a hair's 
breadth. If the gods decree — he dies, with no 
more say in the matter. 

For how many centuries has man continued 
under the domination of this fear of nature? 
How has he fawned, truckled, wept, and im- 
plored! With what consequences? Either his 
god did not hear or else he was away hunting, 
for heaven was silent. 

Conceive the pall under which men must have 
lived ! In western Europe, less than three hun- 
dred years ago, the plague swept away the 
population at the rate of forty, fifty, and sixty 
persons in each hundred. At one dread breath 
of the pestilence, — in so many weeks, — whole 
villages were left desolated, uninhabited. The 
people had repented of their sins; they had 
cried aloud to Heaven; they had petitioned, 
begged, — all was useless. With appalling reg- 
ularity, these frightful agents of destruction 
reaped young men and old. Why? Simply be- 
cause they were dirty. 

The cities of those times had no effective 
means of sewerage or of garbage disposal. 
The streets were badly paved. Offal and refuse 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 95 

of every description piled up and rotted for 
years. A visitor to a modern Asiatic city can 
gain an excellent idea of what the medieval 
city must have been. One hot dry summer, 
when everything was ripe for its reception, the 
bacteria would be brought into the country, and, 
carried by the flies or by the vermin on the 
rats — both flies and rats fed on the offal in the 
streets — the plague spread with great rapidity. 
In China and India, similar experiences occur 
to-day. 

What wonder that such people are pessi- 
mists ! Who would not, under similar circum- 
stances, look gloomily into the future? Neu- 
ralgia is bad enough; dyspepsia drives toward 
pessimism; and the worst that we can conceive 
is a combination of rheumatism and St. Vitus' 
dance. We do not know plague. 

The East still stoops before the blows of fate, 
saying patiently, "It is the will of Allah! 
Allah's will is mine." With such grand forti- 
tude, such calm resignation to the inevitable 
wretchedness, do they take what comes, silently, 
without uttering a cry. What can be done? 
Nothing can be done, — " It is the will of 
Allah." To the Western mind, such fatalism 
is utterly beyond belief — yet it is a logical part 
of the pessimism which must exist so long as 
man, failing to appreciate his greatness, fails 
to take complete possession of his kingdom. 

The answer of the West to this pessimism 



96 SOCIAL SANITY 

of the East is clear and sharp. Writing of 
the lords, knights, and squires of England, a 
humble workman says: — 

" // Providence ordain' d them fat 
An' me the lean, I'll answer that. 
If that is true, then Gawd's a cheat! 
'Ave they the right to drink an' eat 

At my expense? 
Wat's Providence a-playin' at? 

Ain't 'e no sense? 

€i I'd be a better Gaivd myself! 
I'd chuck no man upon the shelf 
Who 'ad an ounce o' manly grit, 
Or 'alf an ounce o' manly wit 

To earn 'is keep, 
An' save a modest store o' pelf 
Ere 'is larst sleep. 

" That Gaivd, 'e ain't no Gawd at all! 
I wouldn't 'ear the babies call 
Fer grub, or see the muvvers pine, 
Then style meself a Power Divine, 

Fer if 'e bids 
No sooty London sparrer fall, — 

Wat price the kids? 

" The golden streets, beyond the grave, 
We do not very greatly crave, 
We'd rather in a 'eaven abide 
'Jest lyke our English countryside — 
So drat the 'arp 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 97 

T An' all that gag ; but, 01 to save — 
Dear Gawd, look sharp! " 

The old world bred pessimists because of the 
utter failure of man to control his kingdom. 
Looking backward to the Garden of Eden, 
which had been beautiful once upon a time, or 
forward into the distant future, where they 
should sing psalms, or carouse, or hunt, or ful- 
fill some other ideal dream, men forgot the 
world in which they lived. Their contempla- 
tion of ethereal bliss won by some such simple 
act as dying, led them to forget the possibilities 
of creating bliss in the world by working. 
Scarcely had it occurred to them that it was 
not necessary to die in order to win. In the 
present they saw no possibilities of blessedness, 
nor any hope of salvation, short of a future 
beyond the grave. 

Science sounds the death knell of pessimism. 
If the world is a process ; if Nature always ex- 
presses herself in change; if man may direct 
this change, securing continual improvement, 
why the need for pessimism? The back- 
ward look must give place to the forward 
vision. 

The pessimist, seeing that the world went 
wrong in spite of all he could do, lived and 
mused in a slough of despond, too benumbed 
by doubt, to make even a pretense at consistent 
effort. The optimist, already on the foothills 



98 SOCIAL SANITY 

of hope, sees the valleys and mountains of pro- 
longed effort before him, but he also sees in 
these valleys and mountains possibilities, — 
possibilities in the present world. He may 
bridge, tunnel, cut, fill, — Science tells him that. 
The effort is immense, but the goal! Toward 
these possibilities the spirit within him impels 
him to strive. In this realization he will sac- 
rifice his energy, his time, even his life, if 
need be, since he sees, somewhere on the far 
horizon, better things than any that have yet 
been known. 

Contrast the treatment of the plague in 
medieval Europe with the treatment of yellow 
fever in Cuba and on the Panama Canal Zone. 
Yellow fever was as much a part of Cuban life 
as mosquitoes, sugar cane, or the lazy blue of 
the ocean. The Americans occupied Havana, 
and yellow fever disappeared. An isolated 
case, once in three or four years, is all they 
have to report. How was this marvel achieved? 
How was a city, plague ridden for centuries, 
cleaned of its disease? By the simple process 
of cleaning the streets and catching the mos- 
quitoes who carried the microbe of yellow fever, 
before they clambered out of their native 
marshes. In the Middle Ages, such a trans- 
formation would have been looked upon as a 
Heaven-sent blessing. To-day, it is recognized 
as the logical effect of man's advancing dom- 
inance over his kingdom. 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 99 

The optimist is not sure of success, but he 
is hopeful. He eschews fatalism as he would 
any word of the devil. Always he is a thinker 
and a believer. 

Carried to the extreme, optimism may be as 
fatalistic as the most absurd pessimism. 
" Everything is bound to go right," exclaims 
the enthusiastic student of social affairs. 
" Events will shape themselves so that finally 
all will be well." 

Quickly, then, let us relax in vigilance in the 
Canal Zone, permit mosquitoes to breed, allow 
the hookworm to continue its ravages, and the 
typhoid bacillus to work destruction. Let man 
take his hand for one moment from the throttle, 
and chaos reigns. Almost in a twinkling, chaos 
replaces order and civilized man reduced to 
the status of the savage, buffeted by Nature, 
fearful always for his very life, would cease 
to drive close bargains with Fate, and instead, 
grovel at her footstool. The sentiment will 
hardly find a response in the thoughtful mind 
any more than Browning's " God's in His 
heaven, all's right with the world " meets with 
the approval of the thinker. Such crass op- 
timism leads nowhere. It is but another way 
of saying, — " It is the will of Allah. Allah's 
will is mine." 

After describing this and another type of 
optimistic fatalism, Professor Patrick describes 
what he terms " The New Optimism," — an 



100 SOCIAL SANITY 

optimism based on science and belief, and lead- 
ing to virile effort. This true optimism of the 
twentieth century " might be called dynamic, 
or practical, or psychological optimism. It 
concerns itself with no theoretical questions as 
to whether the world is the best possible one 
or not. It has for its motto — The world is 
pretty good, and we will make it better." This 
optimism of progress repudiates the idea of the 
good old times. " In the museum at Constan- 
tinople the writer saw an inscription upon an 
old stone. It was by King Naram Sin of Chal- 
dea, 3800 B.C., and it said: — 

" ' We have fallen upon evil times 
And the world has waxed very old and wicked. 
Politics are very corrupt. 
Children are no longer respectful to their 
parents. 9 

" This old and ever recurring complaint," 
comments Professor Patrick, " does not depend 
upon any deterioration of the times, for the 
times are constantly growing better. It comes 
usually from older people whose outlook may 
be biased by subjective conditions due to de- 
caying powers and by the tendency to regard 
all changes as changes for the worse."* 

* 4t The New Optimism/' G. T. W. Patrick. Popular Science 
Monthly, May, 1913, Vol. LXXXII, p. 493. 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 101 

Change then will be inevitable. Man may say 
only what form that change shall take. 

Man's kingdom is a good kingdom, but over 
it, suspended by a hair, hangs the sword of 
Damocles. A moment of relaxed vigilance — a 
generation of dissipated indifference, — vermin 
have bred on the offal of civilization, a rat has 
gnawed the hair by which the destruction was 
suspended, the sword falls, shattering the 
mighty triumphs of the Western world and 
hurling man again into an abyss of darkness. 
Civilization hangs suspended by the veriest hair 
of human effort. Eternal activity is the price 
of deliverance. Eternal activity, aye, until, 
one day, who knows? May not a solution be 
compounded in which the sword of civilization's 
danger may be dissolved and scattered far and 
wide over the face of the deep? 

Civilization, in this dilemma, turns to the 
optimist for the words of life, for in optimism 
lies social salvation — not the salvation of the 
idler, but that of the enthusiastic worker. 

" If we will," cries the optimist, as he sur- 
veys the Augean Stables of Civilization, " if 
we will, we may." 

He may — nay, he must, — for the spirit of 
his task drives him to his labor. The optimist 
cannot bear the world as it is. His very nature 
forces him to make it what he believes it ought 
to be. Nor does he, like Hercules, waste more 
than he creates. The optimist has learned that 



102 SOCIAL SANITY 

beauty grows from the most repulsive ugliness, 
hence, as he labors he employs every atom of 
filth from the stables for the raising of roses, 
lettuce, corn, and dahlias, mignonette, and vio- 
lets, to minister to the body and soul needs of 
those who bear the burden of life's day. 

Pessimism is social suicide. The crass op- 
timism which believes that everything must 
turn out right is nothing less. Sane optimism is 
the spinal column of social progress. The true 
optimist is a worker — frankly recognizing the 
magnitude of the task before him and as frankly 
believing that it is within his power, and that 
of his descendants, to accomplish that task. 

The optimist relies on knowledge, but he re- 
lies no less absolutely upon belief. In the dis- 
tance, he sees the vision of a nobler race, living 
in an environment superior to anything hitherto 
known. They are the descendants of his gen- 
eration. They are reaping the fruits of his 
effort. He glories in their nobility, in the rich- 
ness of their lives, and with the eyes of his 
spirit on this vision, he labors. Thus has every 
artist, poet, scientist, statesman labored, look- 
ing forward, hopefully, toward the goal which 
the eyes of his inner consciousness saw in the 
distance and toiling toward it with the enthu- 
siasm of a child or of a genius. 

Optimism is a belief in the possibility of 
preserving the race and raising its standards 
through successive generations. 



PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM 103 

In the past, the standards of life have been 
constantly raised, through successive stages. 
The biologic world has been improved genera- 
tion after generation by means of a process 
which eliminated the unfit and allowed only 
the fit individual members of a species to sur- 
vive and propagate their fitness. In exactly 
the same way social institutions have been im- 
proved by replacing the worthless elements 
with newer and more worth-while forms. With- 
out such a selection of the best, no species and 
no society could endure. By means of it, the 
best in each generation is preserved for the 
future, while the rest is cast away. 

This is nature's method of protecting her- 
self against deterioration. Hence all who raise 
the " back to nature " cry should welcome it 
with glad hearts, recognizing it as the conceiver 
of progress, the savior of civilization. In so 
far as man is to make a success of civilization, 
Nature's task of selection must be his method 
too. Everywhere, without regard to individual 
hardship, he must reject the worthless, and re- 
tain only that which is worth while. Only thus 
will the instruments of civilization and progress 
be continually improved. 

The primitive man used a tool or a weapon 
because it had been used by his fath.er. The 
modern manufacturer throws away a more de- 
sirable tool than any ever possessed by the 
savage, because he has found a better one. The 



104 SOCIAL SANITY 

modern navy discards expensive, intricate, mur- 
dering devices because more effective ones are 
to be had. The school teacher turns from the 
old method to the new. The doctor lays aside 
his dirty ways and practices antiseptic surgery. 
The farmer, no longer guided by the moon or 
the planets, reaps a rich reward from the adop- 
tion of scientific methods of agriculture. Each 
man is learning that the law of nature is im- 
mutable because it is right, — the more worthy 
alone may remain; the less worthy must dis- 
appear. 

Whether in science, education, industry, or 
politics, this truth is getting fast hold of men's 
souls. They are learning that, since life is a 
becoming and since man may will to direct it, 
guided by his visions of the future, could all 
possess an optimistic attitude toward life, soci- 
ety might readily preserve itself in the pres- 
ent, and continually raise its standards through 
succeeding generations. Hence, at the basis 
of social sanity lie optimism and vision applied 
through the preservation of the best in each 
generation; hence at the basis of man's king- 
dom lies a staunch belief in man's potentialities. 



LIFE AND LIVING 

The pessimism or optimism of world vision 
is reflected in each life. As the man believeth 
in his soul, so is he. Those who look hopefully 
into the future — who have faith in the possi- 
bilities of the kingdom of man — cannot but re- 
flect such beliefs in a buoyant spirit of effective 
living. Those who, on the other hand, dwell 
perpetually in the " good old times " must 
fail in effectiveness because they fail in stimu- 
lus to sane living. The life-spirit makes the 
man. 

Each individual who dwells in the kingdom 
of man plays a part in making and directing 
the life stream of the kingdom. Each one lives 
a life. It is not possible that the spirit of a 
kingdom can rise above the spirit of its citi- 
zens. The spirit of the kingdom of man is the 
spirit of its citizens, hence the sanity of life 
in this kingdom must, in the last analysis, rest 
back upon the individual lives of which the 
whole life stream of the kingdom is composed. 

Accepting the statement made in an earlier 
section, that sanity is a relative idea, having 

105 



106 SOCIAL SANITY 

as its basis the thought of self-preservation 
and self-perpetuation as it is revealed in the 
feelings of the normal man, let us ask our- 
selves frankly the question, — Is American life 
sane? Does the individual live in a manner 
which he believes to be best calculated to in- 
sure his preservation and the preservation of 
those who are to come after him? He is a 
citizen of the kingdom; a part of the life 
stream of society; how sane is his individual 
life? Does he believe that it is sane? Do we 
believe that it is sane? To each individual the 
test must ultimately be applied. Is he pursuing 
in his actions and dealings the course that a 
policy of sanity would dictate ? As a part of a 
great pulsing world, he moves forward toward 
— what? He strives for — what? Are his ends 
and his methods such as a spirit of individual 
and social sanity would sanction? Let us see. 

Perhaps the simplest of all the facts which 
men have to face is the fact of living. The 
simplest? Well, no, it is rather the most com- 
monplace. In truth, men are apt to take living, 
like breathing, as a matter of course. After 
a few years of keen sensory pleasure in living, 
it becomes a reflex. 

Living has formed the subject of many a 
Puritan homily and Cavalier romance, yet no- 
where has more been said, in short space, than 
by Robert Louis Stevenson, in his little essay — 
" Aes Triplex." Stevenson, unlike most of his 



LIFE AND LIVING 107 

fellows, lived, organically at least, from hand 
to mouth. Having one foot in the grave, urged 
on by the oft-repeated assurance of his physi- 
cians that he would last but so many days or 
weeks, he naturally acquired an interest in life. 
Hence the poems, songs, and essays that he 
wrote reflected, in a peculiar sense, the soul 
of a man who was enraptured with life and 
living. He writes of both as something outside 
of himself, yet sympathetically, and in a kindly 
spirit that makes a universal appeal. He be- 
gins his essay on death by stating it as his 
opinion that men do not fear death; they are 
interested in life. Nor are they deeply con- 
cerned with life as the philosopher sees it. Ab- 
stract philosophy, Stevenson says, " has the 
honor of laying before us, with modest pride, 
her contribution towards the subject; that life 
is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly 
a fine result ! A man may very well love beef, 
or hunting, or a woman ; but surely, surely, not 
a Permanent Possibility of Sensation ! He may 
be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large 
enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man ; 
but not certainly of abstract death. We may 
trick with the word life in its dozen senses 
until we are weary of tricking; we may argue 
in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but 
one fact remains true throughout — that we do 
not love life, in the sense that we are greatly 
preoccupied about its conservation ; that we do 



108 SOCIAL SANITY 

not, properly speaking, love life at all, but liv- 
ing." 

The closing paragraph of this brief essay 
contains a spirited statement of his philosophy 
of life. " It is better to lose health like a spend- 
thrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better 
to live and be done with it, than to die daily 
in the sick-room. By all means begin your 
folio; even if the doctor does not give you a 
year, even if he hesitates about a month, make 
one brave push and see what can be accom- 
plished in a week. It is not only in finished 
undertakings that we ought to honor useful la- 
bor. A spirit goes out of the man who means 
execution, which outlives the most untimely end- 
ing. All who have meant good work with their 
whole hearts have done good work, although 
they may die before they have the time to sign 
it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheer- 
fully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in 
the world, and bettered the tradition of man- 
kind. And even if death catch people, like an 
open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast 
projects, and planning monstrous foundations, 
flushed with hope, and their mouths full of 
boastful language; they should be at once 
tripped up and silenced ; is there not something 
brave and spirited in such a termination? And 
does not life go down with a better grace, foam- 
ing in full body over a precipice, than miser- 
ably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? 



LIFE AND LIVING 109 

When the Greeks made their fine saying that 
those whom the gods love die young, I cannot 
help believing they had this sort of death also 
in their eye, for surely, at whatever age it over- 
take the man, this is to die young. Death has 
not been suffered to take so much as an illusion 
from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe 
on the highest point of being, he passes at a 
bound on to the other side. The noise of the 
mallet and chisel are scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trail- 
ing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, 
full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual 
land." 

Although dying daily in his sickroom, Steven- 
son could pen his deathless Requiem, — 

" Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me lie; 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will." 

What more splendid fortitude could issue from 
the strongest soul! What higher view of life 
could man take, — to live gladly; to die gladly! 
Truly, here was a philosopher! 

Yet Stevenson does not stand alone — far from 
it, — the same buoyant enthusiasm which charged 
his spirit may be met on every street corner. 
Stevenson was a man; Stevenson could use his 



110 SOCIAL SANITY 

pen in an incomparable manner, hence his phi- 
losophy comes to us clothed in lucid rhetoric. 
How many there are who believe his philosophy, 
and daily practice it, unheralded to the world ! 

Years ago, I knew a boy who overflowed with 
the joy of enthusiastic life. His energy carried 
him everywhere and carried his fellows with 
him. There was a spirit, in his frank, clear 
blue eyes, that made him irresistible, so that 
even his worse pranks were forgiven. Loved 
and loving, he was the pride of all of us. Never 
have I met a being more filled with potential 
power. 

A few days since, I sat beside the bed where 
he has been lying for nearly three years, 
gripped, through no fault or carelessness of his, 
by a bacterial poison which has affected every 
joint in his body. When I saw him, he had just 
undergone a severe operation which meant life- 
long lameness. 

Before he underwent the operation, he wrote 
to a friend, " If I pull through the operation, 
I will get well and you will hear from me. If 
I don't live through it, father will write to 
you." Such words come nobly from a boy of 
sixteen, and when I talked with him I found 
him no less valorous than his words implied. 
Although he has slipped forward and backward, 
on his slow road to recovery, he faced the fu- 
ture in the same hopeful spirit. The operation, 
severe in the last degree, did not cure him, as 



LIFE AND LIVING 111 

he had anticipated, yet he greeted me with all 
the cordiality which our years of separation 
might have warranted. 

While I sat there, before the spirit of this 
superman, he showed me his camera, and told 
me how, from his bed, he took pictures, devel- 
oped and printed them; showed me his man- 
dolin, which lay under his pillow, and told me 
how he had learned to play; described to me, 
in detail, his experiments in crocheting (I have 
since had an opportunity to see some of his 
work, which is extremely fine) ; told me more 
than I had ever heard before of the science 
of aeronautics ; named all of his old friends by 
name, sending them all sorts of messages ; and 
then, when train time was cutting short our 
visit, told me in parting that he was fairly con- 
fident now that he was on the road to recovery, 
that if he recovered he was going to college, 
but that if, in the end, things turned against 
him, he was satisfied that way too. If he had 
a life before him, he would live it full, but if 
he had not, why, then, he would live his best 
until the end came. 

May I say, without offense, that I felt, when 
I left that boy, as Moses might have felt after 
his encounter with the spirit of God in the burn- 
ing bush ? Why not ? Had not I too encountered 
the spirit of the Living God? 

Should you regard such a case as exceptional, 
ask any physician of a wide experience, and 



112 SOCIAL SANITY 

he will duplicate it a hundred times. Such 
strong souls — such manly men — are men at their 
best. The crass part of existence has fallen 
away from them. Standing on the threshold 
betwixt life and death, facing the issues of 
living as they are presented, they choose life, 
so long as they may live, — taking its richest, 
fullest essence, — and when they may no longer 
live, they accept death with the same glad spirit 
in which they accepted life. It is so that Leon- 
idas and his men lived and died at Thermop- 
ylae — dressing themselves with scrupulous care, 
going gladly into battle, and at last, betrayed 
and taken in the rear, dying with a dignity 
which became their lives. Thermopylae is not 
alone. The Japanese soldiers who walked up 
to one of the gates of Pekin, set down a great 
charge of dynamite, and stood there, defending 
it against a sortie, until it exploded, were no 
less brave. Each campaign supplies a host of 
similar instances. 

Peace, too, has her victories for the human 
soul. Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo tasted the 
cup of martyrdom for the mere assertion of 
their beliefs. The scientist who studies yellow 
fever at first hand, and dies discovering the 
remedy for the scourge, deserves no less a name. 

Not alone on the field of battle, not alone 
in the laboratory and the rostrum, not alone 
on the sick-bed do men formulate and adopt a 
philosophy of life. All men cannot be soldiers 



LIFE AND LIVING 113 

or scientists or even invalids, but all men live 
with that strong fortitude which becomes man- 
hood. 

Granting the splendor of the human soul, is 
our life sane? Admitting the possibilities of 
human grandeur, are our lives and the lives 
of those about us worthy the title? Ah! You 
hesitate. Is there then some doubt? How in- 
evitable! People looking through the eyes of 
the East doubt. G. Lowe Dickinson writes: — 

" And when I look at your business men, the 
men whom you most admire; when I see them 
hour after hour, day after day, year after year, 
toiling in the mill of their forced and unde- 
lighted labors; when I see them importing the 
anxieties of the day into their scant and grudg- 
ing leisure, and wearing themselves out less 
by toil than by carking and illiberal cares, I 
reflect, I confess, with satisfaction on the sim- 
pler routine of our ancient industry, and prize, 
above all your new and dangerous routes, the 
beaten track so familiar to our accustomed feet 
that we have leisure, even while we pace it, to 
turn our gaze up to the eternal stars." To be 
sure, Western Civilization is moving. Whither? 
Ah! we had not thought of that. We were in 
too much of a hurry. Inoculated with the 
American " rush " bacteria, we hasten on, and 
on, and on. 

Consider this case of a man who lived in a 
suburb of New York. One train, leaving his 



114 SOCIAL SANITY 

suburb at 7:58, made the run to Jersey City 
without a stop. Each day the man planned to 
take this train. He rose at 6:45; began his 
breakfast at 7 :20 ; and at 7 :50 climbed into his 
carriage and started for the station. Most 
people allowed ten minutes for the drive to the 
station, but our friend always saved two min- 
utes in the last quarter-mile. Eegularly, each 
morning, the 7:58 pulled into the station, and 
the hurrying commuters turned their heads to 
see, two hundred yards down the street, a pair 
of handsome bay horses, plunging full gallop 
toward the train. The carriage reached the 
train as it was starting, the man leaped out, 
grasped the handles of the last coach, and 
swinging himself aboard with a sigh of relief 
he settled back in his seat to peruse one of 
the morning papers. The first stage of his 
day's work was over. 

At Jersey City, a hurried dash — a hundred 
yards at least — took the gentleman to the ferry. 
Once on the New York side, another dash of 
a hundred yards took him to a cab, which, 
driven fast by the fee-promised cabman, soon 
reached the office where the commuter, divest- 
ing himself of his street garments, sat down, 
read two other papers, and then went about 
the office work of the day. At five the hurry- 
ing process was reversed, although the drive 
from the station to the house was peaceful. So 
he lived all of his days, cutting the corners 



LIFE AND LIVING 115 

close in order to save time, yet always in a 
hurry. 

" What a number of time-saving devices yon 
have here," said a visitor to a New Yorker. 

The New Yorker, expanding with pride, 
showed the elevated, the subways, the surface 
lines, the tubes, the elevators, and the mail 
chutes. The visitor was greatly impressed, yet 
as a reasoning creature he must put one ques- 
tion. 

" Just the same," he demurred, " with all 
of your time-saving knick-knacks, I never was 
in a place whe're people had less time. What 
do you do with all of the time that you save 1 ' ' 

" Why," stammered the cosmopolite, " why, 
we " 

" I see," interrupted the provincial, " you 
use it in making more devices to save more 
time, which you can again use to make more 
devices and so on until, having saved time in 
all possible directions, you have not a particle 
of time left. Queer, isn't it? " 

Isn't it queer? In the place where the most 
time is saved, men have the least. Nor is the 
time-saving mania confined to men. Women 
too save time in many little ways, and then 
squander these savings in many other little 
ways, reaching the end of the day with a heavy 
deficit. 

American women have kept the pace, vali- 
antly. Let any man who thinks that he is in 



116 SOCIAL SANITY 

training for crew or track, attach himself to a 
busy woman, follow her through breakfast; 
through the intricacies of a toilet that baffles 
description or duplication; into street habili- 
ments; to the station; into town on a nerve- 
racking train; into the shopping district for 
two hours of standing and pushing which would 
exhaust a vigorous street-peddler; to the li- 
brary; to the music store; to luncheon; to the 
hair-dresser's; to the extension lecture course; 
to the store again for a forgotten pattern; to 
the station, the train, and the home ; into a din- 
ner costume; to a five-course dinner; to a 
friend's house for the evening. Think, you 
robust, well-trained athlete, of the condition 
of utter fatigue which would grip your frame 
at ten the next morning. But does the woman 
mind it? Not at all. To-morrow she will do 
it over again, relieving the monotony by a dash 
of suffrage, a changed costume, a tea, a dinner 
call, or some other diverting activity* 

" Broken nerves? " 

" Yes." 

" Dyspepsia? " 

" Certainly." 

" Shattered health? " 

" Of course, but everybody " 

Yes, everybody is doing it. Why? For two 
reasons. First, because it is such fun to hurry 
that before you know it you are in the hurry- 
ing spirit, moving along so fast that it is im- 



LIFE AND LIVING 117 

possible to stop short of the happiness which 
all are hurrying to find; and second, because 
men think that by hurrying they will be able 
to amass things, goods, lands, homes, fur coats, 
Swiss watches, automobiles, and all of the long 
train of useful articles and bootless trumpery 
which fills the store windows and the lives of 
those who can afford to buy them. 

Probably, if the truth were said, the desire 
for things lies at the bottom of the hurry and 
turmoil of American life. 

Pause a moment, analyze the goal toward 
which the hurrying throng is moving. They, 
of course, have never paused, for they have had 
so little time ! What value have things ? Only 
this, that by supplying men's wants, they make 
for happiness. The wants of men, yearning 
toward happiness, give rise to a demand for 
things. 

Wants may be natural — those which involve 
the necessaries of existence : food, clothing, and 
shelter— or they may be acquired. Most wants 
are acquired, — their acquisition depending upon 
education and circumstances. The knowledge 
of new things brings with it new wants. For 
the table cover, we need a table; for the table 
a room; for the room a house; and for the 
house a new lot. To be sure, the process may 
be reversed, but there follows, in the train of 
each want satisfied, a series of new wants, 
made larger by each suggestion of the possi- 



118 SOCIAL SANITY 

bilities of more things. Thus the satisfaction 
of wants carries with it, as a necessary corol- 
lary, the creation of new wants, so that as civ- 
ilization progresses, and the number of things 
to be had increases, the wants of the individual 
increase, if not in a geometrical, then certainly 
in an arithmetical, progression. 

The things upon which the satisfaction of 
wants depends can be secured in only one legiti- 
mate way, that is through income, hence upon 
income depends the possibility of want satis- 
faction. Does income, like wants, increase in 
an arithmetical ratio? Well, perhaps your ex- 
perience differs from that of most of us. Our 
incomes crawl forward at a ratio that savors 
not so much of mathematics as of the snail. 

The difference between wants and income 
measures the extent of a man's dissatisfaction, 
- — misery, Dr. Patten calls it. If a naked sav- 
age wants two fish for breakfast and can catch 
only one, he is miserable; if a fine lady wants 
a diamond tiara to wear in the opera box, and 
cannot secure it, she is miserable; if a farmer 
has a buggy and wants an automobile which 
he cannot afford to purchase, he is miserable. 
All of these dissatisfactions result from the 
discrepancy which exists between wants and 
the means of satisfying wants, — income. Hence, 
wants minus income equals dissatisfaction. 

Consider the next point. Wants are limitless. 
If experience teaches anything it is that there 



LIFE AND LIVING 119 

is no end to the variety of things which man 
can make and advertise to his fellows; hence 
there is no limit to the number and variety 
of things which he may desire to have. On 
the other hand, there seems to be no imme- 
diate limit to the number of things which a 
certain individual may want. Income, however, 
is definitely limited — for the greater part of the 
population — to an amount which will buy the 
bare necessaries of life. Even in the case of 
the middle class — of all, in fact, except the ex- 
travagantly wealthy — income does not increase 
appreciably in proportion to the increase in 
wants. 

"What follows? If wants are limitless, and 
increasing faster than income, which is limited, 
and if the difference between wants and income 
measures the extent of dissatisfaction, or mis- 
ery, then, so long as men seek their satisfaction 
in material things, relying upon goods for hap- 
piness, they are pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp 
which flies from them faster than they can 
ever pursue. The quagmires of despond yawn 
before them. Unless they forego their pursuit, 
and seek satisfaction in some other form, they 
have a life-sentence of progressive misery. The 
gates of joy have closed on them forever. 

If you grant the premises the conclusion is 
inevitable. On all sides, too, it is bulwarked 
by the testimony of fact. Look at those who 
have expected happiness to flow from wealth. 



120 SOCIAL SANITY 

They surround themselves with luxury of every 
description, grasping eagerly at each new ob- 
ject or fad, as a drowning man grasps at a 
straw. Yet for all their wealth of things, they 
are keenly unsatisfied — probably farther from 
the real satisfaction of life than they were 
before their fortunes were amassed. 

A college Freshman was once expounding his 
philosophy of life. He must make a million 
dollars. A million dollars, — nothing else would 
do. 

" Why," he was asked, " do you want a 
million dollars? " 

" Because I would be happy." 

" And why would you be happy? " 

" Because," was his prompt reply, " I would 
have a million dollars." 

Basing his life on this circular philosophy, 
the youth was pressing confidently forward. 
He had a goal. He saw it clearly and expected 
to attain it. Perhaps, in his small way, this 
boy epitomized the philosophy of life which 
has gripped a part of the American population 
— the philosophy: " Be rich and you will be 
happy. ' ' 

How absurd does this attitude seem to an 
outsider, or to one who, like G. Lowe Dickin- 
son, writes as an outsider. Note the analysis 
which he makes of the hurry and get rich phi- 
losophy. " You will answer, no doubt, that 
we shall gain wealth. Perhaps we shall; but 



LIFE AND LIVING 121 

shall we not lose life? Shall we not become 
like you? And can you expect us to contem- 
plate that with equanimity? What are your 
advantages ? Your people, no doubt, are better 
equipped than ours with some of the less im- 
portant goods of life; they eat more, drink 
more, sleep more; but there their superiority 
ends. They are less cheerful, less contented, 
less industrious, less law-abiding; their occu- 
pations are more unhealthy both for body and 
mind ; they are crowded into cities and factories, 
divorced from Nature and the ownership of the 
soil." 

By way of contrast, Mr. Dickinson points 
to the obverse of the picture. " A rose in a 
moonlit garden, the shadow of trees on the 
turf, almond bloom, scent of pine, the wine-cup, 
and the guitar; these and the pathos of life 
and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched 
out in vain, the moment that glides forever 
away, with its freight of music and light, into 
the shadow and hush of the haunted past, all 
that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the 
wing, a perfume escaped on the gale, — to all 
these things we are trained to respond, and the 
response is what we call literature. This we 
have; this you cannot give us; but this you 
may so easily take away. Amid the roar of 
looms it cannot be heard; it cannot be seen in 
the smoke of factories ; it is killed by the wear 
and the whirl of Western life." 



122 SOCIAL SANITY 

Such words must challenge even the fastest 
hurrier. They must give pause, even to those 
who have believed, with a simplicity akin to 
the faith of little children, that they and their 
life were, while all others might become. 

The unbiased observer is struck by the failure 
of such men to gain a tolerant viewpoint; by 
the unwisdom of the American " Hurry " and 
" Things " philosophies; by the great gap — 
the gulf — which yawns between modern life and 
personal contentment; by the muchness of life 
and the littleness of living. 

A proud Indian Chief, who had been urged 
to work by a missionary, penetrated far into the 
things — sophistry. 

" You must enter the shop and work," urged 
the missionary. 

"Why? " asked the Chief. 

" Well, if you work hard, you will be pro- 
moted and your wages raised." 

"And then? " 

" Well, you will be made a foreman, if you 
do very well. ' ' 

" And then? " the Chief persisted. 

" Keep moving," continued the mission- 
ary, " and you may be appointed superinten- 
dent." 

" What then? " 

" Well, if you are successful, you can estab- 
lish a shop of your own, and have many people 
working for you." 



LIFE AND LIVING 123 

" Ah," exclaimed the Chief, " then I wouldn ? t 
have to work myself, would I? " 

" Certainly not," the missionary exulted. 

"Well," mused the Chief, "I don't have 
to work now. ' ' 

We have wants, we learn, we hurry, we get 
things, new wants, more things, and yet more 
wants, and so at last, having reached a point 
where our wants are infinitely beyond our in- 
comes, we are more miserable than we were 
at the beginning; or else, if we are among the 
favored few whose incomes are so vast that 
we cannot want their full compass, we surround 
ourselves with a myriad of things, and at last, 
blase and weary of the never ending pursuit 
of objects, retire to a bungalow in the Cana- 
dian Eockies, catch trout, grill them over a 
fire of pine knots, and, while we wash our own 
tin dishes, thank God for a few blessed hours 
of free life. 

Well sayest thou, Philosopher, " Vanity 
of vanities, — all things are vanity." From its 
inception to its consummation the worship of 
things leads to naught save vanity and vexation 
of spirit. 

Yet, the fullness of time holds more than 
one solution of life's destiny. In truth, there 
are three kinds of living, — puppy living, living 
for the sake of living, and living for a pur- 
pose. Most individuals pass through these 
stages, civilization has passed through them, 



124 SOCIAL SANITY 

or is passing through them. The universe, too, 
in so far as sentient life is concerned, has ex- 
perienced them. The same individual may live 
all three lives in one day or one hour of the 
day, yet some one of them usually dominates 
his life at a given time. 

Puppy living is the life of physical energy. 
The puppy, sporting in the sun; the child, 
cavorting about among the haycocks, are illus- 
trations of puppy life — the life of surplus ani- 
mal spirits. The life of undeveloped beings, 
or of developed beings in moments of utter 
forgetfulness of those things which differen- 
tiate them from undevelopment. 

With advancing years — with adolescence, 
and the coming of the emotions, a new life 
sweeps into the individual existence. It is then 
that people live for the sake of living. The 
truly appreciative drunkard lives for the sake 
of living. Fiery, foolish Eomeo, so sore pierced 
with love's shaft that he could not soar with 
his light feathers, lived for the living. The 
mountain climber, the hunter, and fisherman 
live for the living. 

Strongly contrasted with these two forms of 
life, is life for a purpose. It is only lately, in 
the history of the world, that life for a purpose 
was possible. Man, like nature's other crea- 
tures, lived his puppy stage, and then lived 
to live — having no other purpose than to drive 
off his enemies, assure himself against starva- 



LIFE AND LIVING 125 

tion, and to propagate his kind. To-day the pur- 
poseful element in life has overshadowed all else 
— making of life a round of " duty," " ought," 
1 ' should, ' ' and like commands of purpose. To 
be sure the purpose may be tawdry enough. One 
may labor to earn a hundred dollars in order 
that he may bet on horses ; a woman may dress 
herself in a fashion established by Parisian 
tailors, in order to be beautiful. Men and 
women, otherwise sane, may conform to a thou- 
sand petty tyrannies which society imposes upon 
them, in order to be socially successful. On 
the other hand, a scientist may, with unflagging 
zeal, devote his entire life to the pursuit of 
one family of bacteria; a mechanic may live 
and die in the attempt to create a new form of 
motive power; a zealot may labor for years in 
a jail, teaching and preaching to the prisoners ; 
a woman may devote herself to rearing her 
family; a doctor may devote himself unre- 
servedly to the welfare of his patients. Such 
lives are lives-^with a purpose. 

Purposeful lives are continually held up be- 
fore children for their emulation. Washington, 
Lincoln, Cromwell, and Garibaldi were purpose- 
ful patriots. As such they are lauded and re- 
membered. They are our examples. Men and 
women who € ' do things ' ' command our respect. 
The emotional appeal of purpose is immeasur- 
able and omnipotent. The world stands aside 



126 SOCIAL SANITY 

to let a man pass who knows whither he is 
going. 

Living must be purposeful if man is to have 
a kingdom, for the kingdom must be ruled, — 
ruled by strong purpose. Doers as well as 
hearers of the word must arise if man is to 
remain upon his throne. 

What follows? Must all living be purpose- 
ful? Shall men abandon living for living's 
sake and the joy of expending surplus energy 
in puppy life? Merely because these things are 
not connected with " duty " and " ought," 
must they be left behind in the quick advances 
of progress? 

God forbid! 

Life must be lived. Neither as an emaciated 
ascetic nor as a boisterous libertine does a man 
fulfill the demands of life. Sane living differs 
from all of these, because the sane life, while 
making due allowance for all of the impulses 
which direct the activities of men, denies the 
necessity for excess in any direction. " Noth- 
ing too much," cries the Sage. 

Could the boundaries of sane living be de- 
fined; could they be set down in general terms 
which would apply to one individual as to an- 
other, they would include these seven things: 
To live. 
To express. 
To enjoy. 
To understand. 



LIFE AND LIVING 127 

To believe. 

To grow. 

To increase life. 
How would anything less than these seven ac- 
tivities be included in the scope of sane living? 
Men are alive — it is not a shame to live. 
Bodies are ours. Then why should we shrink 
from them, treating them as though they were 
a disgrace? It is enough that the bodies are 
here ; it is enough that they demand care ; it 
is enough that impulse carries us fast and far. 
To live — yes, just to live, — to lie softly under 
a budding tree, basking in the spring sunshine ; 
to shout aloud an old, melodious song ; to run, 
leap, play, gambol; to plunge into cool swift 
water on a burning hot summer afternoon, — 
merely to live, and to rejoice in being alive. 
What more sane? What more sure pathway 
to the salvation of body and mind? 

Then to express. What thy hand findeth to 
do, do it with thy might — with the whole im- 
pulse of thy heart. Express! Express!! 
Whether in -music or mechanics, express the 
inner thought of a being endowed with an in- 
finite power of expression. Through expres- 
sion men grow. In the furnace of hot effort, 
the dross is burnt away. When the surges 
of a soul mount like a great tidal wave of 
energy and enthusiasm, there is expression, 
unfolding, growth. 

Bring together these two, live, express — and 



128 SOCIAL SANITY 

a third follows as the night the day — enjoy. 
Man had won half the fight for his kingdom 
when he learned to laugh. Longfellow assures 
us that " Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, is 
our destined end or way; but to act, that each 
to-morrow find us farther than to-day." Alas, 
then, what shall we do on this journey? May 
men never take from life its joy? May they 
never feel the thrilling glow of exhilaration that 
wells up with the surplus of life within? May 
men never glory in the infinite satisfaction 
which comes with expression? Look! Yonder 
man has laid himself this last hour in the sun- 
shine, while I have made a song of rare beauty, 
— may we not both enjoy our life? Not the 
end, mayhap, but a device for insuring the ease 
and convenience of travelers as they journey. 
We dare not dispense with joy! 

Withal, there must be understanding. Life 
is not all cool water-brooks, nor songs, nor 
virile enthusiasm, nor rollicking fun. It is given 
to men to combine these things by virtue of 
their judgment and their reason. Thus is it 
necessary, also, to understand. 

It is a strange fact, though none the less 
true, that he who lives all of his life merely 
to live, is, in the end, as dissatisfied with it as 
he who lives it only to express or only to en- 
joy. Here Judgment, the wise mentor, asserts 
her omnipotence, — " Hast thou expressed with- 
out joy? " she protests. " Then, for all these 



LIFE AND LIVING 129 

years of narrowing existence, which thou hast 
chosen, I condemn thee henceforth to joy with- 
out expression. Thy whole soul shall surge 
within thee, without showing itself even in thine 
eyes." So are we eternally cursed if we choose 
the narrow way. At a fearful price Darwin 
paid for his science — at the cost of his music, 
his poetry, and his art. How much better a 
man of science might he not have been had these 
stayed with him during his later years ? Do you 
not understand? It is the straight and narrow 
way which leadeth to the prison cell, to repres- 
sion, bitterness, damnation. 

Said my friend to me, ' ' I was never a child. 
When my maiden aunt had kept me seven years, 
though I was but twelve on the calendar, I was 
three hundred, as men measure life. Thus, I 
have experienced life's joy; I never learned 
what it meant to live. Can you wonder that as 
a man of middle age, I try, now and then, to 
drop my business, throw it all aside, and catch 
up with some of that youth which is fleeing 
farther aneLiarther from me? " Why, good 
friend, should we wonder? Do men gather figs 
of thistles? 

'Tis the understanding which must balance 
the affairs of life. But the understanding which 
brings men to know other men is the most 
precious of all. All other things which men 
can desire are incomparable with that knowl- 
edge of other men's souls which comes with 



130 SOCIAL SANITY 

an understanding of them and theirs. We walk, 
sit, talk, think, and laugh together. We under- 
stand. We are friends. What more, what bet- 
ter can we ask? 

Yet the understanding heart must believe, 
since many things rest as much on belief as 
on the understanding. The teacher, believing 
in his pupils, sees with pride the marks they 
make in the world. The scientist, believing in 
his work, sees at last the fruits of belief in the 
triumph of his thought. The friend, believing 
in his friend what he can neither understand 
nor prove, rejoices in the confirmation of his 
belief. Belief is the soul of living. Transcend- 
ing the bounds of judgment and understanding, 
it carries men sheer into the environs of Para- 
dise. 

Out of all these things, — out of living, ex- 
pression, joy, understanding, and belief shall 
come growth. Bather, these things are growth, 
— the growth of the well-rounded man. In 
these things he portrays the body, mind, and 
soul which is in him. Through his portrayal, 
he learns, and again portraying, scores each 
time a greater triumph. 

Last of all, because he has grown, he may 
himself increase life. Because he has lived to 
manhood, he may add to the race of which he 
is a part. Because he understands and believes, 
he may say to his friend, " Friend, I say unto 
thee, arise," and the friend will rise, and in 



LIFE AND LIVING 131 

the strength of a new might which has been thus 
given to him, shall he go forth and conquer. 
It is glory enough for one day — nay, even for 
one life — to have added to the life stream of 
the race, and to the courage of a friend. 

This is living. In these realms lie those 
things which are most worth while in life, be- 
cause they serve for the expression of the in- 
dividual soul of to-day, and for the unfolding 
of the individual soul of to-morrow. 

These things we learn slowly. At its rapid- 
est, our pace is aught but speedy. Glance at 
yesterday, and to-day seems painfully similar; 
look to Hellas and to the Seven Hills, the 
change is but small ; glance back again to Egypt 
and Babylon, there is surely some progress 
now; and if the mind travels farther still, grasp- 
ing the chasm which yawns between civilization 
and barbarism, and the still wider abyss be- 
tween barbarism and savagery, it seems that, 
after all, men are learning how to live. Per- 
haps, in twenty centuries, the world will use 
a term like ^^barbarism ' ' to apply to this civ- 
ilization. 

Still does the race advance. Still does it 
press on toward its goal — increasing the 
breadth and meaning of living for all who will. 
Still does mankind move up and up in its reali- 
zation of the fuller meanings of life. At first, 
like the beasts, living to feed, and feeding to 
live and propagate their kind ; now, in these later 



132 SOCIAL SANITY 

years, advancing to the consciousness of a larger 
life, in which purposeful effort plays a leading 
part, mankind is learning what life means 
— in its sane fullness. When we have learned 
these sayings, and pondered them diligently in 
our hearts, one further thought must we remem- 
ber, — that in none of these matters can you and 
I live sanely until that other, over yonder, en- 
joys similar opportunities for sane life. 



VI 

THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 

Welfare is plural for sane living. It is some- 
thing more than that too, for it connotes an 
opportunity for individuals to lead sane lives. 
More than a century ago, a group of men, writ- 
ing an instrument of government which they 
called " The Constitution of the United States 
of America," set forth in their preamble an 
intention " to promote the general welfare." 
Although, judges, lawyers, and even laymen 
have indulged in heated disputes over the power 
granted to the Federal Government by the gen- 
eral welfare clause, it seems perfectly clear that 
the words " general welfare " are there used 
to mean an aggregation of individual welfares, 
— that is, the living of sane, normal lives, and 
further the^opportunity so to do. 

Nor should "wealth" and "welfare" be 
regarded as identical. Wealth and welfare are 
not synonymous terms, nor is welfare always 
purchasable by wealth. Welfare is an end in 
itself, — non-material, to be sure; based on the 
satisfaction which the individual is securing 
from life. Since individual satisfaction de- 

133 



134 SOCIAL SANITY 

pends upon the sanity or normality of life, 
rather than upon the amount of wealth pos- 
sessed, welfare is conditioned upon sane living. 

Neither is it possible to apply the term 
11 welfare " where the life of one individual 
is to be conserved at the expense of the other. 
The man whose chickens feed on his neighbor's 
lettuce; the woman who idles on the overwork 
of her husband ; the man who hires men to work 
for him, and pays them less than they earn; 
the man who lives at ease, while the community 
works to supply him a living, — the term welfare 
cannot be applied to these, because the pros- 
perity of one depends upon the adversity of 
another. Welfare has, therefore, both a per- 
sonal and a social signification. Personally, 
welfare refers to sane living; socially it refers 
to an opportunity for such living in the com- 
munity at large. 

Not only are wealth and welfare not syn- 
onymous, but where they appear as ends or ob- 
jects of endeavor, they are actually contradic- 
tory. Wealth is one end, welfare another. Be- 
tween them there stretches an arid plain of 
dissatisfaction. Few men of wealth succeed 
in crossing this plain because of the infinite 
difficulties involved in serving God and Mam- 
mon. Nevertheless, many must start from the 
Mammon side, and either construct a passage- 
way across, or else take a running start and 
leap the sheer abyss. 



THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 135 

The relation of wealth and welfare has been 
one of vital concern ever since the opulent Sol- 
omon rhapsodized over the blessings of poverty. 
Perhaps sanity lies at neither extreme. While 
money may, indeed, be the root of all evil, it 
is likewise the trunk on which the branches of 
progress, the twigs of satisfaction, and the 
fruits of welfare appear. Note this interesting 
succession of concepts. Men may strive for 

1. Money. 

2. Wealth. 

3. Wants. 

4. Progress. 

5. Civilization. 

6. Welfare. 

A man may strive for money, the counters 
of the life-game, and, like the miser, hoard them 
and gloat over them. In this way, during a 
lifetime, he may amass a great " pile," stand- 
ing out alone among his contemporaries, — en- 
vied by the mediocre, cursed by the discontented, 
and pitied by the few. Or he may overlook 
the counters and work for the things which the 
counters represent, — the wealth of society. In- 
stead of surrounding himself with counters, he 
surrounds his life with luxury — living alone 
amidst his wealth, and thus, by the possession 
and use of the wealth, satisfies the wants which 
led him to expend his effort. In his struggle 



136 SOCIAL SANITY 

for money, — either as an end in itself, or as 
a means to wealth, and thus to the satisfaction 
of wants, the man has been working for him- 
self only, animated primarily by the wish to 
protect himself or to satisfy his personal de- 
sires. 

Broadly speaking, the man who strives to 
obtain either money or wealth to satisfy his 
wants, is seeking wealth, or the things that 
wealth will buy. On the other hand, an indi- 
vidual may aim toward welfare. In that case, 
he devotes a part of his energy to progress,— 
a forward movement for the entire group to 
which he belongs. Either he devotes his ener- 
gies primarily to social advance, or else, seeing 
in social advance his own greatest welfare, he 
strives, through the progress of society, to 
further his own interests. If many persons be 
of his mind, so that a large group is striving 
for progress, civilization will be advanced, and 
the welfare of each member of the group will 
be increased. Thus men learn that where each 
is for all, all are for each. In order to insure 
progress and civilization, it will be necessary 
to use money and wealth to satisfy the wants 
of the individual, yet there is just as wide a 
difference between working for wealth and 
working for welfare as there is between play- 
ing baseball for scores and playing to play a 
good game. In the first case you work for 



THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 137 

counters; in the second you work for growth 
and skill. 

Economic and social endeavor must have 
some goal. Shall it be wealth or welfare? 

The social scientists who wrote in the eigh- 
teenth and early nineteenth centuries were in- 
clined to the view that the chief aim of national 
as of individual life should be the acquisition 
of wealth, hence the question of welfare held 
a very minor place in their philosophies. Sim- 
ilar workers in the last half of the nineteenth 
century have completely revised this judgment, 
and, since John Stuart Mill evolved from a clas- 
sical economist into a social reformer, they have 
replaced the ' ' Science of Wealth " by a " Sci- 
ence of Welfare." Early writers maintained 
that economic goods were the logical end of 
endeavor; that the nation which produced eco- 
nomic goods in great abundance was the suc- 
cessful nation, irrqspective of any other test. 
The newer school holds, on the other hand, that 
social progress lies, not in the production of 
goods, but in the developing lives of men and 
women, and that, while this end may be achieved 
through the production of goods, the produc- 
tion is merely incidental to the development 
of manhood and womanhood. Production, 
therefore, ceases to be regarded as an end in 
itself, and becomes a means to welfare. Some 
thinkers have even gone so far as to say with 
John Ruskin, " There is no wealth but life," 



138 SOCIAL SANITY 

meaning that the real reliance of a nation must 
be placed, not on the amount of its economic 
goods, but on the number of i i bright-eyed, full- 
chested men and women " which it can boast. 

Where the rights of wealth clash with the 
welfare of men, wealth is being ignored to a 
greater and greater degree. The twentieth cen- 
tury is rapidly developing into a Welfare Cen- 
tury. The struggle for wealth still continues, 
but it is everywhere tempered by the growing 
insistence on the primal importance of welfare. 

With a clearing vision men are realizing that 
wealth and welfare must, sooner or later, come 
into conflict. When they do, with legislatures, 
courts, administrative offices, tariff debates, 
and diplomatic negotiations, the ultimate test 
is that enunciated by Abraham Lincoln, — ' ' We 
are for both the man and the dollar; but in 
case of conflict we are for the man before the 
dollar." 

A man has no real opportunity to live unless 
some means can be devised whereby his welfare 
is to be assured. Social sanity and social prog- 
ress both depend upon it, because social in- 
tegrity is impossible in the absence of indi- 
vidual well-being. 

Furthermore, and for the purpose of this 
discussion, the wholly important point lies here : 
man must guarantee this welfare to himself. 
His kingdom — the civilization which he has 
built through the centuries — fails in all if it 



THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 139 

fails in this. Since civilization is the conver- 
sion of nature's forces to serve human needs 
— to conserve welfare, social evolution means 
merely an additional control over old or new 
forces, for the service of man. 

Thus the process of securing welfare — the 
process of adjustment it is sometimes called — 
is a continuous one. In each age the problem 
differs, but the necessity for adjustment re- 
mains. 

Adjustment may be learned at first hand from 
Nature, since she is continually shaping old facts 
to fit new needs. Nature is a born reformer. 
In her domain harmony must prevail. But har- 
mony is natural, you protest. Aye, harmony — 
adjustment is natural. What a pity that we 
do not paraphrase Rousseau's behest, and raise 
the cry " Back to harmony— back to adjust- 
ment! " 

Nature has set plainly before us her exam- 
ples. She respects neither age nor tradition, 
but acts as the need of the hour demands. The 
things which are old are not sacred to her. 
" The hills, rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," 
are swept away before her commanding pres- 
ence. Her waters are continually at work, erod- 
ing, adjusting their paths to the changes in 
earth formation. A mountain range is thrown 
up, and the waters begin their downward trickle 
and sweep, tearing away the earth and stone, 
until the river has worn down its bed to a nor- 



140 SOCIAL SANITY 

mal gradient and created a canon of the Colo- 
rado. Adjustment is not yet complete. The 
river continues its work, cutting away the sur- 
rounding hills until it flows through a great 
plain like the Mississippi Valley. If another 
line of hills appears, the water, undiscouraged, 
begins again, working eternally to accomplish 
its end, — an adjustment to gravitation. 

The river is seeking to establish a normal 
gradient, and before this attempt to secure ad- 
justment even the hills must succumb. Soci- 
ety, like the river, seeks to adjust itself to the 
changing contour of the environment by wear- 
ing it away and smoothing it down until a 
normal relation is established between men and 
their surroundings. 

Cascades, rapids, and whirlpools are abnor- 
mal in rivers, hence Nature strives to eliminate 
them and % secure a regular, uniform river-bed. 
Premature death, accidents, overwork, and mis- 
ery are abnormal in society, hence a sane group 
strives to eliminate them and secure a more 
perfect adjustment to the normal life. 

The river works blindly — naturally — to secure 
its end; men work intelligently — consciously — 
to secure theirs. Could the river employ gun- 
cotton, electric power, reinforced concrete, and 
structural steel, how much more effective would 
be its work! 

The river accomplishes its purpose by means 
of many particles of water, all flowing in the 



THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 141 

same direction, — co-operating for the accom- 
plishment of a set purpose. Society accom- 
plishes its end by means of many men and 
women, all aiming at the same goal, — co-operat- 
ing, — removing, one by one, the obstacles to 
progress. The river seeks adjustment to the 
normal through the laws of nature; man seeks 
adjustment to the normal by combining nature's 
laws and adding to them a touch of human 
genius. The river is a part of the kingdom 
of nature. Society is a part of the kingdom 
of man. In both kingdoms there are unmeas- 
ured possibilities for the adjustment of means 
to ends and of material things to human wel- 
fare. 

Adjustment is the normal condition of a sane 
society. Hence, men and women, whose ideals 
include welfare, aim to remold social institu- 
tions in such a way that every life may be 
joyous and effective. Some of the institutions 
which bar the path of progress are venerable 
and hoary with age; others are of such late 
origin that they have scarcely entered the pale 
of respectability. To both classes of institu- 
tions, however, the same test must be applied. 
11 Do you augment or diminish welfare? " By 
this fruit we know and judge them. By this 
criterion we justify or condemn. 

The activities of a small group of earnest 
men who demand social adjustment are called 
u agitation/' but when the movement has grown 



142 SOCIAL SANITY 

to great proportions, that stigma is forgotten, 
and enthusiastically, reverently, men speak of 
u reformation." If the movement is strong 
and well directed, so that a large measure of 
adjustment is secured; if all antiquated and 
barbaric institutions are replaced by institu- 
tions that meet the needs of a newer civiliza- 
tion; if the full possibilities of society are re- 
alized; then adjustment is complete. Society 
has reached a normal gradient, has become 
sane, — providing always for its preservation 
and perpetuation in the best attainable manner. 
But the normal is constantly changing. One 
generation creates an ideal; the evolution of 
the succeeding age makes this ideal the normal. 
Thus the ideal of one age becomes the normal 
of the age that follows. In no age, therefore, 
can adjustment be complete; at no time is man's 
kingdom wholly subjugated. Each forward 
step necessitates another step. Each act makes 
necessary other acts. Welfare too is a becom- 
ing, evolving with each age greater possibilities 
in the age which follows. Social adjustment 
in any age is an approximation to the normal; 
but with invention and progress, education and 
evolution, the possible development of each age 
is a step in advance of the possibilities of the 
preceding age. As possibilities increase the 
normal standard of society moves forward. 
Each age, to complete its adjustment, must re- 
alize all of these possibilities. Plato dreamed 



THE GOSPEL OF WELFARE 143 

of a time when machinery should replace slaves. 
This was merely an ideal, unattainable in 
Plato's age. But machinery has been invented 
which, with human direction, creates masses of 
wealth undreamed of at an earlier epoch ; hence, 
the possibilities of civilization, — the scope of 
welfare, the boundary of man 's kingdom, — have 
advanced since Plato wrote ; and machinery has 
brought to our society new opportunities which 
must be utilized before welfare is attained. 
The test of modern welfare is, therefore, not 
the narrow, slave-supported possibilities of two 
thousand years ago, but the widespread, ma- 
chine-made opportunities of to-day. 

It is not enough that we leave our institutions 
as our fathers shaped them. They knew little 
or nothing of the conditions which we face. 
Sufficient unto the age is the work thereof. It 
is not the right of any generation to project 
its will into the future, but it is the duty of 
each generation to adjust its institutions to 
meet its own needs. 

Men need not wait until death to realize many 
of their ideals. They can have things here on 
earth which their fathers associated with the 
millennium. They need no longer overwork, nor 
go cold and hungry, nor suffer from pestilence 
or even famine. Machinery has provided the 
possibilities of a new life. When all of these 
possibilities are realized, — when no one is over- 
worked, or cold, or hungry; when all are lead- 



144 SOCIAL SANITY 

ing joyous, purposeful lives, — adjustment will 
be complete, — welfare will be universal. 

Observe that there is, in this whole discussion 
of welfare, no word concerning philanthropy. 
Despite their use as synonymous, the words 
differ both in meaning and in spirit. Philan- 
thropy does not connote welfare. Neither for 
the man who gives nor for the man who re- 
ceives is welfare assured. The spirit " let us 
help them " is of assistance to neither party. 
The philanthropist violates every law of man- 
kind, — he reaches down. Man's nature looks 
and reaches across or up. Welfare will not be 
assured when all of the rich are generous. Not 
until men and women have an opportunity to 
live sane lives is welfare really attained. 

Neither to-day, nor yet to-morrow, will wel- 
fare be secured. We, in our own age, and our 
children after us will still fight the good fight 
for progress. Yet to-day has gained a victory 
over the things of yesterday, and to-morrow 
hath its triumphs even more notable than those 
of to-day. Welfare is a becoming. In each 
generation, we secure of it a greater measure 
which will be augmented by those who follow us. 



VII 

HUMAN RIGHTS 

The life stream of civilization leads forward 
toward,— sane living for the individual ; adjust- 
ment and welfare for society; the inviolability 
of human rights. These things total to social 
sanity. 

A false doctrine has possessed our minds 
with regard to human rights — false because it 
was founded on guess and not on science. Dur- 
ing long centuries men accepted without ques- 
tion the belief that the aristocracy had a fiber 
superior to that of the common people. Even 
to-day one race calls itself dominant; one na- 
tion feels the infinite space that separates its 
talents from those of another; one group of 
people, styled " middle class," looks down from 
its height of conventional discomfort upon the 
11 working class," as they would look upon some 
inferior beings. Pride of birth still holds sway 
in the minds of men who yet have to learn 
from Nietzsche that the children's land, not 
the fatherland, is the end of human endeavor. 

How large a measure of man's character is 
the product of the opportunity which he has 

145 



146 SOCIAL SANITY 

had in life, and how large a part is due to the 
man himself, none can finally say, but it seems 
to be increasingly plain that the real differences 
between most men are small indeed. The time 
has therefore passed when men and women can 
blame one another for what they do and what 
they are. 

Who knows? After all, it may prove to be 
true, yet after centuries of training it is hard 
to realize that in most cases people are not 
" to blame." Blame? Should that word ever 
be employed, or should men, learning the po- 
tency of opportunity in shaping the average 
life, come into the belief that blame cannot rest 
upon most individuals? If Lester F. Ward is 
correct, and his painstaking analysis seems wor- 
thy of credence, then, " There is no need to 
search for talent. It exists already and every- 
where. The thing that is rare is opportunity, 
not ability." 

Heredity plays its part, of course. Through 
heredity is derived the raw material which the 
environment must shape. True it is, that 
1 ' Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap," with this addition, that if he is thorough 
about his preparation of the soil and his cul- 
tivation, he will have a greatly increased chance 
of securing a good crop. 

The student of human rights soon wanders 
into the barren fields of eighteenth century con- 
troversy. When all is said and done, are there 



HUMAN RIGHTS 147 

such things as human rights? All thinking 
men recognize, of course, that those eighteenth 
century philosophers were mistaken who as- 
sumed that men were born with certain rights 
attached to their persons, very much as the 
fingers were attached to their hands, or the 
lashes to their eyelids. So far as logical proof 
is concerned, human beings have no inherent 
rights. Nevertheless, society has reached the 
point of recognizing the validity of the claim 
of each individual to certain privileges. In 
short, society recognizes certain rights where 
none actually exist. The result is the same, 
however, and every child born into the kingdom 
of man has certain well-defined rights which 
civilization may not deny without violating all 
of its own experiences. 

Frequent use has been made of the analogy 
between the body as an aggregation of living 
cells, and society as an aggregation of living 
individuals. The body, as it has been pointed 
out, is more than an aggregation of cells, — it is 
an organism, functioning as a unit. Turn for 
a moment to the field of mechanics. Here are 
twoscore belts, gear wheels, pulleys, and levers, 
so co-related as to constitute a machine lathe. 
All of these units, functioning together, turn 
a shaft, or a cylinder. Nevertheless, it is pos- 
sible to have every one of these units in work- 
ing order, and running separately, without cre- 
ating one unit of product. The real value of 



148 SOCIAL SANITY 

the machine lies in the co-operation of the vari- 
ous parts in the processes of the machine. Sim- 
ilarly, in the case of society, the item of real 
importance is the cohesion and co-operation. 
The social body, functioning as a unit, is in 
reality something more than an aggregation 
of individual parts. 

Society, like the machine, depends for its 
effectiveness on the effectiveness of the indi- 
vidual units which compose it. Among their 
other good qualities, where they have a "so- 
cial ' ' or " co-operative ' ' spirit strongly devel- 
oped, the group spirit will take a much higher 
form than it could where the social side of the 
individual man was less highly organized. In 
the last analysis, the quality of society rests 
on the quality of its component parts. The 
river is no higher than the drops of which it 
is composed. Society is no more advanced than 
the individuals composing it. 

How patent then seems the statement that 
the standard of any given society is determined, 
for each generation, by the generation imme- 
diately preceding, since each generation sup- 
plies the heredity, and prescribes the environ- 
ment out of which the succeeding generation 
grows. This idea is open to serious miscon- 
struction. It becomes clear only when men 
learn to think of generations as indistinctly 
blended with one another. Accustomed as most 
persons are to dealing with the successive gen- 



HUMAN EIGHTS 149 

erations in a family, they find it difficult to con- 
ceive of the infinite blending that goes to the 
making of a generation in society. 

Imagine a picture of the present generation 
taken on the first day of January. Here 
would be an octogenarian, taking leave of his 
friends with the death rattle already sound- 
ing from his flattened chest; there a youth 
and maiden, swearing to love and cher- 
ish one another through all eternity; yonder 
a baby girl who utters her first piping wail, 
while in the next operating room, a great sur- 
geon, by a false stroke of the knife, frees a soul 
of thirty summers from a broken body; that 
virile man of fifty is dominating the railroad 
world; this maiden lady crochets aimlessly, un- 
decided whether to wait a little longer or to 
teach school. Bearing, loving, marrying, hurry- 
ing, burying, — all the thousand phases of life 
would be revealed if one could look through 
society. One generation does not stop where 
the next begins. Society is a continuous stream, 
slipping almost imperceptibly past the stones 
which mark quarter-centuries. To-day, the new 
generation is being born; to-day the past gen- 
eration is shaking off worn-out bodies; to-day 
the present generation is toiling to maintain 
itself and to build the future, while it makes 
pleasant the expiring days of the past. Like 
the life stream of evolution, the life stream of 
society glides forward, endlessly. 



150 SOCIAL SANITY 

Social evolution differs from biologic evolu- 
tion in one respect, however — society is becom- 
ing more and more conscious of potential king- 
ship, feeling the fuller powers of human noble- 
ness. Primitive man never dreamed of his 
greatness. It remained for the later members 
of the species to evolve a consciousness of their 
power, and with this consciousness, the power 
itself. To-day society, in increasing degree, is 
directing its own evolution. Kellicott has 
coined an excellent title — " The Social Direc- 
tion of Human Evolution.' 9 Society is at work 
making society. 

The two dominating attributes which are 
peculiarly characteristic of sentient life, — the 
desire for self-preservation and for self-per- 
petuation, — translated into social ideas, lead 
each generation so to organize the social struc- 
ture in the present that the individuals consti- 
tuting it may have the largest opportunity for 
individual expression, and so to shape the social 
structure in the future that, in increasing de- 
gree, such an opportunity may be afforded to 
all of its members. 

Self-preservation and self-perpetuation may 
be made the first law of social as they are of 
biologic nature. They lie at the basis of evo- 
lution. To preserve and perfect its structure 
is the sane, normal function of society. If so- 
cial sanity involves anything, it involves the 
application of these principles to social advance. 



HUMAN RIGHTS 151 

Since, however, the social standard is deter- 
mined by the standard of the individuals in 
society, social preservation and perpetuation 
necessarily implies raising the standard of the 
individuals of which society is composed. 
Hence society, in its efforts to attain sanity, 
must insist on certain human rights, such as 
the right to be well born, the right to normal 
childhood, and the right to an opportunity for 
the free expression of individuality. 

The right to be well born is based on the 
necessity for maintaining a high race standard. 
In no other manner can ultimate social stand- 
ards be preserved, since the hereditary quali- 
ties of the individual play a significant part 
in determining individual achievement. Be- 
fore all else, heredity must be right. 

Nature, through all ages, has insisted on good 
heredity by a process known as natural selec- 
tion. Under the impetus of this process, each 
species produces a surplus of offspring. Since 
there are more individuals born than can sur- 
vive, the unfit die, leaving the fit to be the 
parents of the new generation. Thus is the 
standard of the race preserved, by guarantee- 
ing parenthood to the fittest. Only among men 
do defective individuals live ; in human society 
alone can degeneracy be the product of the sur- 
vival of the unfittest. 

Yet in human society this is so, and children 
are born into the world who are a burden to 



152 SOCIAL SANITY 

themselves and to their fellows. Perhaps it 
was not Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes who made 
the original remark, but it is credited to him 
that he said, referring to a case of serious 
illness : — 

" There should have been a consultation." 

" Is it too late, Doctor? " asked the anxious 
mother. 

" Yes, madam," replied Dr. Holmes, " the 
consultation should have been held before the 
marriage of his grandfather." 

It was too late, because this child had in his 
system the ancestral taint. An act which in- 
fuses into a new creature the taint of hered- 
itary defect is an anti-social act. It is an act 
against which a sane society should vehe- 
mently protest. Hereditary defect, transmitted 
through generations, develops a stock which is 
forever defective. From its scourge society has 
but one recourse, — elimination. 

The extent to which this taint may operate 
to the detriment of society has been revealed 
by some recent investigations of heredity. One 
of these investigations concerned itself with 
two families of the same name, living in one 
part of the country. The first family was highly 
respected and wealthy, numbering among its 
members some of the leading men of the state. 
The other family was shiftless, lazy, vicious, 
and criminal. The first family traced its de- 
scent proudly to a man prominent in the latter 



HUMAN EIGHTS 153 

part of the eighteenth century. The descent 
of the second family appeared untraceable until 
at last an investigation revealed the fact that 
the progenitor of the good branch had, in his 
youth, become involved with a very pretty, half- 
witted girl, who bore him a child and gave it his 
name. The entire second family, with its train 
of vice and misery, was traceable to the off- 
spring of this mating between a man of the 
highest standard and a defective woman. This 
illustration is merely typical — duplicable at will 
wherever the subject of heredity has been care- 
fully dealt with. 

Science has definitely established the trans- 
missibility of feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, Dal- 
tonism, and a number of other defects, through 
the channels of heredity. Persons marrying 
with such defects are practically sure of hand- 
ing them on to some of their descendants. 

At this point then the issue is squarely raised. 
" Has the child a right to be well born? " If 
he has, persons with transmissible defects have 
no right to parenthood, and a sane society, in 
its effort to maintain its race standards, would 
absolutely forbid hereditary defectives to pro- 
create their kind. Aside from any question of 
race elevation, — a very real question, by the 
way, and one that, in the next century will 
rise to a problem of the first magnitude — -the 
present standard of the race is at stake so 
long as its defective elements are permitted to 



154 SOCIAL SANITY 

transmit their defect to future generations. It 
is, therefore, the part of a sane policy of social 
preservation to segregate or sterilize those 
members of the social group who show signs 
of hereditary defect. Hardship? To be sure 
such a process works individual hardship in the 
present, but it fends off individual hardship 
and social misery in the future. 

No less emphatic than this prohibition on 
the transmission of hereditary defect should 
be the prohibition on the mating of those who 
suffer from communicable disease. Although 
radically different in origin from hereditary 
defect, disease may play no less havoc with 
life. 

Although science has pretty definitely estab- 
lished the non-hereditary quality of bacterial 
diseases, a specific tendency toward certain 
diseases may be transmitted, opening the way 
for the activity of disease germs. This par- 
ent with weak lungs has contracted tubercu- 
losis. Will these weak lungs — not, mind you, 
the tuberculosis — be transmitted to the child? 
Like any other hereditary quality they may be 
so transmitted, and the child in an atmosphere 
rank with tuberculosis bacilli will contract the 
disease. 

A disease, on the other hand, like syphilis, 
which infects the offspring before birth, is as 
deadly as hereditary defect, since it pervades 
the whole parental organism and is communi- 



HUMAN EIGHTS 155 

cated to the new life almost as soon as life 
begins. Like all others suffering from disease 
dangerous to the new generation, syphilitics 
should be denied the right to procreate. 

Society, depending for its continuance on 
robust men and women, must crush out with 
an iron hand every tendency which makes 
against virility, in order that the child may 
be well born. What less could a rational society 
ask than that its children begin their lives with 
the best possible hereditary qualities? 

After birth, during years of comparative 
weakness and incapacity, the child is dependent 
upon environment for his development. The 
child, as Burbank has put it, absorbs environ- 
ment. At the point of conception, heredity 
has done its work, and from that point on en- 
vironment alone plays its part. It is during 
this period that the child has a right to demand 
normal life, that is, a chance to grow physically, 
mentally, and spiritually, and a chance to work 
and play. Psychologists having established a 
pretty definite connection between growth and 
play, it remains for society to insure the one 
by guaranteeing the other. 

Platitudes! Platitudes! so trite and so old 
that they must be good. Written and spoken 
for centuries, and yet unlearned. Shall we 
write and speak them again? 

A boy was born into a household, perhaps 
a little below the ordinary in point of income. 



156 SOCIAL SANITY 

His father was a skilled man engaged in a trade 
where work was precarious. Consequently, he 
spent considerable time warming his shins by 
the fire at home. The mother, an irascible 
woman, somewhat jealous by disposition, and 
possessed of a tongue that might have stayed 
the doughtiest word-bandier, first learned to 
direct her abuse at her too-frequently idle hus- 
band. If a dish broke, he was scolded; if the 
cat stepped in the rising bread, it was his fault ; 
when the grocer was late, the torrent of words 
shifted from the retiring delivery boy to the 
man by the stove. Being a man of great equa- 
nimity and of a calm demeanor, the husband 
took the abuse in the same manner that he took 
sugar in his coffee. It became a part of his 
daily fare. When the mother turned her atten- 
tion to the boy, however, she encountered unex- 
pected obstacles, for he had a disposition 
much like her own. His tongue was quick 
and ready, so when she scolded, he reviled, and 
when she swore, he went one better. He never 
raised his hand against his mother, however, 
and she, finding in that her only recourse, van- 
quished him with a shower of blows, driving 
him from the house. 

The boy was not a bad boy, and, moreover, 
he was quick to learn, so that, in the course 
of three years, he had acquired a great deal 
of information from his long sojourns with the 
boys of the streets. He could appropriate milk 



HUMAN RIGHTS 157 

from door-steps, rob " drunks/' and break slot 
machines with the most adept. Then, too, he 
made the acquaintance of several vicious 
women, who liked his vivacity, and paid him 
well for doing their bidding. So he grew, and 
at fifteen there was not a tougher specimen 
of boyhood in that part of the town. 

By chance, in one of his escapades, the lad 
fell into the clutches of the police, went to the 
committing magistrate, and then to a small farm 
school for delinquent boys, where he was set 
to hard work. He labored for weeks, and at 
last, one day, as he was harrowing up a newly 
plowed field, he said to the head of the school : — 

" Do you know, I believe I could do better 
if I stayed here. When you see the harrow 
breaking up the lumps, you can't help thinking 
good thoughts." 

In the city, this boy was a robber. In the 
country, he was a philosopher. Surrounded by 
his gang, and beset with temptations, driven 
from home, and without interest in school, he 
had faced toward the penitentiary and plunged 
along at breakneck speed. A new environment 
gave him a new viewpoint. He became another 
boy. 

The great mass of men are born neither de- 
fectives nor geniuses. They are shaped by their 
environment. Given a normal childhood, they 
will develop into normal adults, but in the face 
of a subnormal childhood, their adult life will 



158 SOCIAL SANITY 

be misshapen and distorted. The vast majority 
of criminals are not born but made. Any or- 
dinary man, placed in their environment and 
surrounded by their temptations, would have 
done as they did. Child labor, street life, un- 
tidy homes, dissolute parents, low wages, over- 
crowding, and a score of other forces, play their 
part, molding the child into an unlovely crea- 
ture, individually superfluous — socially danger- 
ous. Hence the need for a normal childhood. 

Following this, when the child has become 
adult, a new need gives rise to a new right. 
The individual must have opportunity first for 
self-expression and then for self-perpetuation. 
It is so that the present is ennobled and the 
future is perfected. 

The life of a man is the expression of him- 
self. If his childhood has been normal, he has 
been trained to adequate self-expression in the 
home and in the school. First of all, he has 
been taught to engage in some income-yielding 
activity — to do some constructive thing well. 
Thus, he is provided with a vocation which en- 
ables him to express whatever constructive in- 
dividuality may be his. Then he has been given 
an interest in some secondary occupation — 
some avocation — in the pursuit of which he may 
express another side of his constructive nature. 
In addition to this, he has been taught the value 
of civic, political, and industrial co-operation. 
All of these accessories furnish him with the 



HUMAN RIGHTS 159 

means of doing his life-work. One other thing 
he needs, — that is opportunity for their exer- 
cise. 

Each man must, if he is to be a completed 
man, express his individuality in constructive 
work. Each man must, to be effective, as a 
member of the social group, have an oppor- 
tunity to co-operate thus effectively with his 
fellows. As a product of this activity, he must 
have an income sufficient to enable him to afford 
for his children a normal childhood. 

Could the individual, in justice to himself, 
ask for less than a good heredity, a normal 
childhood, and opportunity for self-expression? 
Can society, in its efforts to preserve and per- 
petuate itself, require a lower minimum than 
this for its individual members? If social san- 
ity leads to social preservation and perpetua- 
tion, a sane society will ever insist that these 
three simple rights belong to every member of 
the race: — 

1. The right to be well born. 

2. The right to a normal childhood. 

3. Opportunity for self-preservation and for 
self-perpetuation. Nor will social effort be 
stayed until this insistence has flowered into 
full realization. 



VIII 

LIFE AND LABOR 

The various eras in history — the bends and 
reaches in the life stream — are characterized 
by certain great issues. To the world of to-day 
those issues are epitomized in the system of 
industry. Science has been bent industry ward ; 
knowledge is knowledge of industry; thought 
is largely of industrial problems ; the profound 
modifications which the past century has made 
in the aspect of the physical world are, for the 
most part, modifications due to the new methods 
of making a living. 

The path to sane living is as plainly marked 
as a path could be. What normal man, aiming 
to support himself and to live his life as a nor- 
mal man should, can miss the goal? What man 
indeed? Of course the answer rests in a meas- 
ure with the man himself. Then, too, it is 
determined by his training. Most of all, per- 
haps, it is conditioned by the opportuni- 
ties which present themselves for earning a 
living. 

It is pleasant as well as satisfying to ex- 
pound life-philosophy. What could be more 
simple than a plea for welfare and for human 

160 



LIFE AND LABOR 161 

rights? They are sufficiently removed from the 
world of affairs to be incon sequential to all 
except those who have leisure and ability for 
analysis, deduction, and contemplation. There 
are other things in life, however, which play 
so intimate a part in the affairs of to-day and 
to-morrow, that they are regarded by everyone 
■ — sometimes with dread, sometimes with mis- 
giving, sometimes with joy, sometimes with 
anger and hate. Among these things, nothing 
plays a larger part in the lives of modern men 
than does labor. 

There is, of course, a handful of people to 
whom labor is but a word. Living lives of ease, 
shielded from the world, removed from all pos- 
sible hardships or satisfactions, they exist like 
imported animals, caged from all except their 
like, in an atmosphere with a regulated temper- 
ature, surrounded by keepers whose duty it is 
to see that they do not escape or come to harm. 
Luckily, a census of the kingdom of man shows 
only a few such unfortunates. They exist 
only in sufficient numbers to act as a warn- 
ing to their virile fellows, of the abysses which 
life may hold for the well-born. 

The great majority of men and women must 
laboiL-for their daily bread. At least as much 
time is spent in earning a living as is spent 
in sleep. Where labor is the sole source of 
income, the welfare of man and family alike 
revolves about the livelihood contest. Can the 



162 SOCIAL SANITY 

man succeed? Will he fail? What are the 
facts of his life? May he live sanely and still 
work, or are the world of modern industry and 
sane life mutually exclusive terms? Weighty 
questions these, and pertinent too, in view of 
the widespread unrest and discontent with the 
present system of production. 

A little reflection on the good old song written 
by the man who had been working on the rail- 
road all the livelong day for the sole purpose 
of passing away the time, leads pretty directly 
into the philosophy of work. Did the monas- 
teries make a contribution to the progress of 
the world when they taught the stalwart pagans 
of western Europe that labor was above all 
things worthy? Certainly one of these sturdy 
dwellers in the forests would have disposed of 
any dozen of his tubercular tenement-dwell- 
ing descendants. Why should work be holy? 
What blessing rests upon the head of the 
industrious? The proud American Indian 
expressed the same contempt for a worker 
that the European did for a scalper. Was he 
wholly wrong? 

The primitive savage with no idea of the 
morrow, nor any thought save for the enjoy- 
ment of the moment, never can understand the 
philosophy of work; but since it has become 
apparent that leisure depends on production, 
which, in turn, depends on work, sages have 
counseled the human race to labor. " He who 



LIFE AND LABOR 163 

will not work, neither shall he eat, ' ' proclaimed 
one of the founders of the New World. 

Solomon thus adjures the idle, " Go to the 
ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be 
wise," yet it is perhaps in the writings of Kus- 
kin and Carlyle that the modern work philoso- 
phy is best expressed. " There is a working 
class," Ruskin writes, " strong and happy — 
among both rich and poor; there is an idle 
class, — weak, wicked, and miserable — among 
both rich and poor. ' ' * It is with work and 
with work alone that the worker is to be con- 
cerned. " I think the object of a workingman's 
ambition should not be to become a master, 
but to attain daily more subtle and exemplary 
skill in his own craft." t So does Carlyle hurl 
aside the pursuit after mere happiness. 
1 ' There is in man a Higher than love of Hap- 
piness; he can do without Happiness, and in- 
stead thereof find Blessedness." t Again, " Be 
no longer a Chaos, but a world or even world- 
kin. Produce ! Produce ! Were it but the piti- 
fullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, pro- 
duce it, in God's name. 'Tis the utmost thou 
hast in thee ; out with it, then ! Up, up ! What- 
soever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
whole^might. Work while it is called To-day; 
for the Night cometh wherein no man can 
work. ' ' § 

* " Crown of Wild Olive." % " Sartor Resartus." 
t " Time and Tide." § " Ibid. 



164 SOCIAL SANITY 

Brilliant as philosophy, such doctrines have 
been applied in the most extreme form in the 
world of modern industry, until work has be- 
come a shibboleth, a sign in which men hope to 
conquer. Success is set high upon a golden 
pedestal, and men, seeing the image from afar, 
bow down to worship, then, inspired by the 
dazzling brightness, they fall to " hustling," 
sure that in time they too may attain success. 
Work-mad, the world sacrifices every better 
thing in life for labor. Before pleasure — 
work; before happiness — work; before blessed- 
ness — work ; before life itself — work ! Success ! 
success ! thou mightiest of all gods, we thy hum- 
ble servants, pausing for a moment in our haste 
to contemplate thy wondrous forms, pledge 
our lives, our fortunes, our families, and our 
sacred time to thee and thy cause. Great God, 
we will work ! 

This is the pledge, and listen! There is the 
humming of machines in tens of thousands of 
sweatshops ; the clatter of the coal breaker ; the 
roar of the blast furnace. That stench? It is 
the stockyards. They are at work. Hark, a 
man is screaming! He has been caught in a 
fast moving machine, hurled aloft, thrown to 
earth, hurled aloft again, against the ceiling. 
His human shape is gone, — battered, lifeless, 
an inert mass drops from the fly wheel — dead ! 
Great God, help him ! he can never work more. 
Faced by the mad rush to labor, what won- 



LIFE AND LABOR 165 

der that men react violently? Who has seen 
a man, crushed out of the semblance of human 
form, carried to his simple home; or met a 
toiler after twelve hours of labor; or watched 
the fingers of young girls fly over an endless 
line of tiny threads; and not felt if only for a 
moment a tinge of remorse? The brilliant Paul 
La Fargue feels it strongly, and in his " Right 
to Be Lazy " voices the protest: — 

" A strange delusion possesses the working 
classes of the nations where capitalist civiliza- 
tion holds its sway. This delusion draws in 
its train the individual and social woes which 
for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. 
This delusion is the love of work, the furious 
passion for work, pushed even to the exhaus- 
tion of the vital force of the individual and his 
progeny. In capitalist society work is the cause 
of all intellectual degeneracy and of organic de- 
formity. Compare the thoroughbred in the 
Rothschild's stables, served by a retinue of bi- 
peds, with the heavy brute of the Norman farms 
which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls 
the crops. Look at the noble savage whom the 
missionaries of trade and the traders of re- 
ligion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, 
syphilis, and the dogma of work, and then look 
at our miserable slaves of machines. The 
Greeks in their era of greatness had only con- 
tempt for work; their slaves alone were per- 
mitted to labor; the free man knew only ex- 



166 SOCIAL SANITY 

ercises for the body and mind. Jesus, in His 
Sermon on the Mount, preached idleness : ' Con- 
sider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they 
toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say 
unto you that even Solomon in all his glory 
was not arrayed like one of those.' " 

La Fargue then discusses the results of work, 
describing the long, hard days of the working 
children ; of the factory girls and women, ' ' pale, 
drooping creatures with impoverished blood, 
with disordered stomachs, with languid limbs." 
He shows how these people live in their pseudo- 
homes, and concludes his analysis with the state- 
ment, ' ' Our epoch has been called the century 
of work. It is in fact the century of pain, mis- 
ery, and corruption. ' ' 

Concluding, La Fargue cites the views of the 
ancients regarding work. " The ancient philos- 
ophers had their disputes upon the origin of 
ideas, but they agreed when it came to the 
abhorrence of work. ' Nature,' said Plato in 
his model republic, * Nature has made no shoe- 
maker nor smith. Such occupations are by their 
very condition excluded from political rights. 
As for the merchants accustomed to lying and 
deceiving, they will be allowed in the city only 
as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have 
degraded himself by the commerce of the shop 
shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he is 
convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in 
prison; the punishment shall be doubled for 



LIFE AND LABOR 167 

each repeated offense.' " " What honorable 
thing can come out of a shop? " asks Cicero. 
11 What can commerce produce in the way of 
honor? Everything called shop is unworthy 
an honorable man. Merchants can gain no 
profit without lying, and what is more shame- 
ful than falsehood? Again, we must regard as 
something base and vile the trade of those who 
sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives 
his labor for money sells himself and puts him- 
self in the rank of slaves." Throughout the 
more advanced civilizations of the past, La 
Fargue finds the same contempt for work. 

Summarizing his philosophy, he writes, — 
11 Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our ma- 
chines with breath of fire, with limbs of un- 
wearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful, in- 
exhaustible, accomplish by themselves with do- 
cility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the 
genius of the great philosophers of capitalism 
remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage 
system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet 
understand that the machine is the savior of 
humanity, the God who shall redeem man from 
the sordid artes and from working for hire, the 
God who shall give him leisure and liberty." 

Here stand the two extremes. On the one 
side Carlyle, the apostle of work; on the other 
La Fargue, the apostle of leisure. With what 
subtle strength does Nietzsche combine the two 
ideals, — sneering at the overworker; praising 



168 SOCIAL SANITY 

idleness; yet glorying, too, in a well-chosen ef- 
fort. " Ye also to whom life is stormful labor 
and unrest, are ye not wearied of life? All of 
you to whom stormful labor is dear, and what is 
swift; what is new and what is strange are 
dear, ye bear yourselves ill; your industry is 
retreat and will to forget itself. If ye had 
more belief in life ye would yield yourselves 
less to the moment. But ye have not enough 
substance within you to enable you to wait, 
not even to idle." Thus does Nietzsche storm 
against the all-absorption in industrial pursuits. 
Yet he believes firmly in some form of work, for 
when all is said, at the end of his profession of 
faith, he writes, — u My woe and my pity, what 
matter? Do I seek for happiness? I seek for 
my work! " * 

No one will question the truth of the protest 
that " Satan finds some mischief still for idle 
hands to do." The proverb is, indeed, self- 
destructive, since really idle hands are as rare 
as hen's teeth. Nevertheless, the statement 
may be accepted on its face without accepting 
the reverse proposition that busy hands are 
never used by the devil. It is, of course, a 
trite observation that some of the hardest 
workers carry in their jeans a through ticket 
to the nether world. 

One thing may be asserted, however, with a 

* ' ' Thus Spake Zarathustra." 



LIFE AND LABOR 169 

fair degree of certainty, — the disuse of an or- 
ganism which has potentialities for action in- 
evitably means degeneration. Parasitism in the 
biologic world always brings its own doom in 
the decadence of the parasite. This biologic 
truth is universal in its application. Idlers 
degenerate. The wages of inaction, like the 
wages of sin, is death. 

The emphasis on idleness is in no real sense 
fair, however, because idleness is not the sole 
alternative to work. The true antithesis of 
work-time is not idleness but leisure-time, — 
time during which a person may act at will. 
This action may take the form of football, or 
some other strenuous physical exercise ; it may 
take the form of painting, writing, or some 
artistic pursuit; it may be employed in crafts- 
manship work; or it may be devoted to the 
study of science. Whatever its form, the fact 
is the same — the time is occupied at the will 
of the person concerned, in some occupation 
other than that involved in the gaining of a 
livelihood. 

Thus defined, leisure becomes one of the 
greatest heritages of the human race — one of 
the choicest fruits of a progressive civilization. 
In leisure lies the very wellspring of progress, 
for, as Lester F. Ward has shown in his " Ap- 
plied Sociology," most of the great contribu- 
tions to human progress have been made by 



170 SOCIAL SANITY 

men who were temporarily released from the 
livelihood struggle. Whether through legacies, 
pensions, royal bounties, generous relatives, or 
some other source, these men were freed from 
the crass struggle for bread, and had their en- 
tire time free for the pursuit of their life-work. 

Napoleon may have been in error when he 
contrasted work and vice. Euskin and Carlyle 
may not have analyzed these problems beyond 
the possibility of cavil. Is La Fargue right 
after all? Where lies the truth? 

Euskin was an artist and a craftsman. With 
Carlyle, a man of letters, he spent his youth 
in those years of the nineteenth century which 
preceded the Civil War in the United States. 

Aside from the drudgery of agricultural la- 
bor, the kind of work which Carlyle and Euskin 
saw was handicraft work. Starting as appren- 
tices, men learned their trades, journeyed 
about the country practicing them, and at last 
settled somewhere as master craftsmen who 
must, in turn, hire their apprentices and jour- 
neymen. Thus did men in the pursuit of their 
calling secure a thorough education in some 
trade, and see the country before establishing 
a permanent home. Industry was hand-indus- 
try, and hand-industry involves growth and 
education. 

The nineteenth century witnessed the anni- 
hilation of handicrafts. The plumber, painter, 
glazier, and plasterer still remain, but they con- 



LIFE AND LABOR 171 

stitute only a tiny minority of the vast army 
of factory and shop workers, whose mechanical 
tasks have been created by a minute subdivi- 
sion of labor and a widespread introduction of 
machinery. Out of this industrial reorganiza- 
tion, there has evolved a type of factory indus- 
try to which the early nineteenth century was 
an utter stranger. 

The laborer of to-day confronts a situation 
essentially different from any which has ever 
been known heretofore. As a small unit in a 
great industrial enterprise, he fails to produce 
a finished product. The dresser of bolt-heads 
never sees the engine of which his bolts become 
a part. The silk-worker in Scranton cleans bob- 
bins, which, when filled, are sent to the weavers 
of Paterson, where they are converted into 
broad-silk. The ballast heaver, on the four- 
track main line, comes his nearest to creating 
a product when he makes a smooth bed over 
which the great west-bound express may glide. 
Eeview the industrial army from vanguard to 
camp follower; pass through the great factories 
from top to bottom; examine the shops and 
mills ; analyze the work of any one person, and 
you will find that it is but one liliputian ele- 
ment in the output of the plant. Here and 
there is an industry, like plumbing, stained glass 
making, fine cabinet work, jewel cutting, and 
the like, in which craftsmanship still exists. 
Even here, however, it is giving place to the 



172 SOCIAL SANITY 

factory method, — each man to his little task in 
the great organized scheme. 

Because men have ceased to turn out com- 
pleted articles, because craftsmanship has dis- 
appeared, men have lost their pride of work- 
manship. Not one person in fifty can point to 
a finished article saying, " I made it, I am proud 
of my work! " With the disappearance of 
craftsmanship has gone one of the chief in- 
centives to activity — the glory of the individual 
workman in doing a good piece of work. In 
the multitude of specialized and subdivided 
factory processes, what reward shall take the 
place of this pride of a man in his own work? 

Further, the modern worker does not use the 
things which he produces. If he makes sausage, 
it is for someone else to eat; he who builds 
Pullman cars, builds them for others to ride 
in ; the producer of farm wagons and machinery 
is no farmer; the employee in a chocolate fac- 
tory loathes the very smell of chocolate; the 
engine builder never runs an engine, nor does 
the worker in automobiles run a machine. One 
makes; another uses; while a third man takes 
the profits. Where in the alchemy of twentieth 
century thought can be found a method of es- 
tablishing an interest in work which never cre- 
ates an entire product, and the product of which, 
when it is created by a thousand inter-working 
processes, goes to others than those who 
made it? 



LIFE AND LABOR 173 

Review the workers, — this shipping clerk, 
with a wife and two bonnie children at home, 
checking up cans of malted milk from early 
morning until late at night. Here is a sales- 
girl who came to the city to be an actress, and 
failing in that, she has been endeavoring to 
make an honest living at some trade or other. 
Now she retails notions. Can you see how the 
passing of bone buttons, tape, pins, and crochet 
needles over a counter should make the hot 
blood of enthusiastic interest course fast 
through her veins? Watch a " press-hand " 
placing bits of paper under a form of type, 
to make hand-bills for a chain of yellow trad- 
ing-stamp grocery stores. Can you observe 
any touch of inspiration on his face or in his 
eyes? Yonder coal-dumper has turned a hun- 
dred tons of coal from the little mine cars into 
the great railroad cars since half-past seven 
this morning, yet he thinks that his family of 
eight may be both hungry and cold unless there 
is more w x ork in December than there was in 
October and November. 

There are men in responsible positions, there 
are skilled workers, who do work that is attrac- 
tive and educative; but the vast majority of 
occupations offered to those who would earn a 
livelihood are mechanical, monotonous, never- 
ending, wearisome, stale, and commonplace to 
the last degree. 

That is the tale of modern labor; that the 



174 SOCIAL SANITY 

opportunity which twentieth century industry 
offers to most of its workers. Unskilled or 
semi-skilled, unrelated to the product which 
they assist in creating, dealt with in masses 
of hundreds and of thousands, known by de- 
partment and by number, the employees of mod- 
ern productive enterprises exchange a half to 
three-fourths of their waking hours, three hun- 
dred and odd days each year, for a wage that 
shall buy them a living. 

Furthermore, and this is perhaps the most 
insidious force now operating in the world of 
work, — industry has been utterly dehumanized. 
Once upon a time the master sat with his ap- 
prentices and journeymen, coat off, and toiled 
like them all day. At noon the master's wife 
summoned them all to dinner, which they ate 
around a common board. First names passed 
from mouth to mouth. All were human beings, 
and all were on a level, humanly. 

Then, as the factory replaced the home shop, 
master and men went from home to work. Still 
they walked to and fro ; still they used the first 
name ; still they knew when grandmothers were 
sick and when babies were born ; still they dealt 
with one another man to man. Still they were 
human. 

Finally, with the growth of industry, with 
specialization, with centralized finances, the 
change came which has placed the laborer where 
he now is, — a cog in a whirling mechanism. 



LIFE AND LABOR 175 

The master goes to his office in an automobile, 
— an office often located in another part of town, 
or in another city from the factory. He break- 
fasts at seven or eight, lunches at the club, and 
goes home early. Sometimes he does not come 
in on Saturdays. Even where he works twelve 
hours a day, he seldom sees his working people. 
He is the president of a corporation which owns 
the mill. Is the corporation human? No, it is 
a legal personality ! Do the workers know the 
master? Of course not, they may not even know 
his face on the street, The worker reports to 
the time-clock; he has a number; he deals with 
the foreman or with the superintendent. From 
the relations between master and men the de- 
velopments of modern industry have taken 
every element of human relationship. 

Last of all comes scientific management to 
tie up, with card systems and tape of blood hue, 
the wreckage of individual interest and enthu- 
siasm which passes in the train of present-day 
toil. Efficiency is its catchword. To efficiency 
the world is turning for leisure — for salvation. 

No word in recent years has sprung so gen- 
erally into popular favor as ' ' efficiency. ' ' Con- 
noting, in a peculiarly direct manner, the spirit 
of American enterprise, the word has become 
a shibboleth. Books appear with " efficiency " 
in the title or sub-title; magazines are devoted 
to its praise; teachers conjure with it; min- 
isters adopt it; and business men deify it. 



176 SOCIAL SANITY 

" Efficiency " is the standard-bearer of indus- 
trial, educational, civic, social, and religious 
advance. 

Efficiency is the capacity to attain given ends 
with the least possible expenditure of means. 
The lawyer can be more efficient in preparing 
his brief; the doctor in interviewing his pa- 
tients; the hod-carrier in climbing the ladder; 
the shoemaker in driving pegs; the teacher in 
pointing up a lesson; the salesman in present- 
ing his goods; the housewife in cooking and 
preparing dinner ; the official in making out tax 
bills; the nation in its appropriation and ex- 
penditures of moneys. Employed in this broad 
sense, efficiency, like charity, covers a multitude 
of sins. This is not, however, the sense in 
which the term is generally applied. In in- 
dustry, where the word has been most widely 
used, efficiency takes the form of scientific 
management. In the eyes of the scientific man- 
ager, there is no " best " way. Each method, 
each department, each job, each operation is 
susceptible of a continuous process of change, 
aimed always at the ultimate goal of securing 
the product with the least expenditure of cap- 
ital and labor. No existing process is sacred. 
All methods, formulas, and systems are open to 
criticism and reorganization. 

The primary advantage of such a doctrine is 
the utter break from tradition which it implies. 
When an individual institution is organized on 



LIFE AND LABOR 177 

a basis of respect for old methods, progress is 
next to impossible. Only when the scientific 
spirit of experimentation grips the minds of 
men can changes be made. Thus underlying sci- 
entific management is the fundamental principle 
that the present is ever subject to analysis; 
and further that industry must accept and act 
upon the results of such analysis, no matter 
what they may be. 

The other essential element in scientific man- 
agement is the elimination of waste. Efficiency 
and waste are the antipodes of industrial proc- 
esses. The presence of one necessarily implies 
the absence of the other. 

Proceeding on these two principles — the fear- 
less challenging of the present and the elimina- 
tion of waste — the advocates of scientific man- 
agement have performed wonders in the reor- 
ganization of industry. Armed with stop- 
watches and time-cards, cost-systems, visible 
indexes, job-sheets, and the like, the forerunners 
of a new industry have prepared to revolution- 
ize the old system of producing goods. Some 
of the most apparent instances of increasing 
efficiency are furnished by the work of Fred- 
erick W. Taylor, the pioneer of scientific man- 
agement. One of Mr. Taylor's first large-scale 
adventures in scientific management was that 
in the works of the South Bethlehem Steel Com- 
pany. In a field adjoining the mills was 80,000 
tons of pig-iron, piled in small piles along a 



178 SOCIAL SANITY 

railroad siding. An inclined plank was placed 
against the side of a car, and each man picked 
up from his pile a pig of iron weighing about 
ninety-two pounds, walked up the inclined 
plank, and dropped it on the end of the car. 

The company had a pig-iron gang consisting 
of about seventy-five men, who were in charge 
of an excellent foreman, who had been a pig- 
iron handler. " This gang was loading on the 
average about twelve and one-half long tons 
per man per day. We were surprised to find, 
after a scientific study of the men at work, that 
a first-class pig-iron handler ought to handle 
between forty-seven and forty-eight long tons 
per day, instead of twelve and one-half tones. 
. . . Once we were sure that forty- seven tons 
was a proper day's work for a first-class pig- 
iron handler, it was our duty to see that the 
80,000 tons of pig-iron piled on the open lot 
was loaded on to the cars at the rate of forty- 
seven tons per man per day, in place of twelve 
and one-half tons. And it was further our 
duty to see that this work was done without 
bringing on a strike among the men, without 
any quarrel with the men, and to see that the 
men were happier and better contented with 
loading at the new rate of forty-seven tons than 
they were when loading at the old rate of twelve 
and one-half tons."* 

* 4 ' The Gospel of Efficiency/' The American Magazine. March, 
1911. Vol. XXI., p. 577. 



LIFE AND LABOR 179 

The first practical step, therefore, was the 
scientific selection of the workmen. With great 
care Mr. Taylor elaborates on the method 
which he employed in picking men who could 
handle forty-seven tons of pig-iron daily. 

They must be dealt with individually; they 
must be docile. The language which Mr. Tay- 
lor quotes himself as using is harsh. He ex- 
cuses himself in these words: — " This seems to 
be rather rough talk. And indeed it would be 
if applied to an educated mechanic, or even an 
educated laborer. With a man of the mental 
type of Schmidt, it is appropriate and not un- 
kind." It is not an equal, not even an " in- 
telligent laborer," to whom Mr. Taylor's 
method appeals. It is a man who will not re- 
sent abuse, and who will have no will of his 
own, — a paid mechanic in human form. 

Mr. Taylor's scheme worked. At the first 
trial Schmidt loaded forty-seven and one-half 
tons of pig-iron. After that day " he practi- 
cally never failed to work at this pace and to 
do the task that was set him during the three 
years that the writer was at Bethlehem. And 
throughout this time he averaged a little more 
than $1.85 per day, whereas before he had never 
received over $1.15 per day, which was the rul- 
ing rate of wages at that time in Bethlehem. 
One man after another was picked out and 
trained to handle pig-iron at the rate of forty- 
seven and one-half tons per day, until all of the 



180 SOCIAL SANITY 

pig-iron was handled at this rate, and all of this 
gang were receiving sixty per cent more wages 
than other workmen around them." 

The output was quadrupled; the wage ad- 
vance sixty per cent. Each pig-iron handler 
did the same task four times oftener during 
each eleven hours. To be sure he was scien- 
tifically guided; his steps were counted and his 
time was watched, but the weariness incident 
to the sameness of his work was intensified 
perhaps ten-fold. 

Mr. Taylor is a plausible writer. How splen- 
did his scheme for Schmidt's welfare sounds, 
yet it is perfectly conceivable that Schmidt, at 
$1.15 per day, loading twelve and one-half tons 
of pig-iron, would be a longer-lived, happier 
man, beside being a better husband and a more 
useful citizen. Mr. Taylor really confesses as 
much when he adds : — 

" It is a fact that in this gang of seventy-five 
pig-iron handlers, only about one man in eight 
was physically capable of handling forty-seven 
and one-half tons per day. With the very best 
of intentions, the other seven out of eight were 
physically unable to work at this pace. Now, 
the one man in eight who was able to do this 
work was in no sense superior to the other men 
who were working on the gang. He merely 
happened to be a man of the type of the ox — 
no rare specimen of humanity, difficult to find, 
and therefore very highly prized. On the con- 



LIFE AND LABOR 181 

trary, he was a man so stupid that he was 
unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work 
even. ' ' * 

What is this? Is it the ox-type of man who 
best performs Mr. Taylor's scientific bidding? 
This is the type of which Markham writes: — 

" Who made him dead to rapture and remorse, 
A thing that grieves not, and that never 

hopes, 
Stolid and shunned, a brother to the ox? " 

It is not of such material that good fathers and 
useful citizens are raised up. Beware, Mr. 
Efficiency-advocate, lest in your pursuit of 
efficiency you trample upon the human spirit, 
putting a premium on thoughtless machines in- 
stead of virile men. 

Yet this gospel of efficiency, like many an- 
other gospel, is fraught with hope for man and 
for mankind. Efficiency pays; efficiency leads 
to leisure. Leisure spells opportunity. In 
efficiency, therefore, lies the hope of democracy. 

There can be no question but that increased 
efficiency means a greater production of goods, 
which may or may not involve a greater ex- 
penditure of human energy. In any case it 
effects an enormous increase in the productive 
potentiality of the community. 

This increase in potential productiveness may 

* Supra, p. 579. 



182 SOCIAL SANITY 

be turned in the direction of future production, 
—that is, it may be used as capital ; or it may 
be employed to decrease the number of working 
hours per day, or of days per week. If the 
former result obtains, the wealth of society is 
increased; the latter result gives additional 
leisure, and, therefore, additional opportunity 
for sane living. 

It would be difficult to overestimate the im- 
portance both to the individual and to the com- 
munity of this extension of opportunity. In 
every form of activity from a foot-race to the 
most distinguished career, opportunity is nec- 
essary to achievement. The runner requires a 
fair race over a good course, to show his fleet- 
ness. The citizen requires a fair chance in a 
normal society to develop his best qualities. 
If the runner is continually tripped and jostled 
by other contestants, his race is spoiled in ex- 
actly the same way that the life of an able 
man who lacks fair opportunity is spoiled. Op- 
portunity is the open door to individual and 
social welfare. 

Opportunity is an equal chance given to the 
members of each generation to become unequal. 
Far from signifying equality, opportunity in- 
volves only the thought that each person have 
an equal start, and a fair course over which 
to run. The " starter " who shoots the pistol 
for the mile race does not make the runners 
equal when he insists that each start at the 



LIFE AND LABOR 183 

same time from the same mark; on the con- 
trary,, he gives the contestants a fair chance 
to show how unequal they really are. Those 
who urge the necessity of opportunity are do- 
ing no more than the starter, — insisting that 
each contestant in the race of life shall start 
fully prepared, with an equal chance to do good 
work. 

America to-day presents rare opportunities. 
The immense strides made in productive effi- 
ciency supply ample amounts of goods. Over- 
work is no longer necessary; leisure is possible 
for all. The possibilities for opportunity were 
limited in the eighteenth century by the limita- 
tions of ignorance, lack of wealth, shortage of 
tools and appliances, and capacity must de- 
velop as best it could. In the twentieth cen- 
tury the possibilities for opportunity have in- 
creased a hundred-fold. Each widening of the 
borders of the kingdom of man signifies a 
widening of man's opportunities. It is not 
enough that we do as our fathers; the increased 
possibilities for effective living which present 
themselves to us to-day demand that we better 
their instruction. 

Industrial efficiency is the greatest boon 
which the modern world offers to mankind be- 
cause out of it may develop leisure and oppor- 
tunity on a scale heretofore undreamed of. 
Productive efficiency pours into the coffers of 
society a stream of wealth which assures a sup- 



184 SOCIAL SANITY 

ply of economic goods for everyone, at the same 
time removing forever the necessity for the 
twelve-hour day, for the overwork of women, 
or the labor of children. Productive efficiency 
permits the economic reorganization of modern 
society. 

Efficiency must go beyond production, how- 
ever, if it is to play its full part in the progress 
of civilization. 

The vast industrial machine which the nine- 
teenth century reared around us is efficient in 
the creation of economic goods. The reaper 
does in one day the work of fifty men ; the 
traction engine plows twenty furrows at the 
same time; iron ore is dug from the ground 
and thrown into cars by a steam shovel, trans- 
ported to the steamer by a locomotive, shot into 
the ore hold by gravity, picked up by a 
grab-bucket that seizes ten tons at a grab, loaded 
again into cars, hauled to the ironworks, 
dumped from the cars, and carried up into the 
blast furnace without the exertion of human 
muscles. 

The electric crane saves human backs. The 
railroad spares horses' legs. The motor sings 
its song of mechanical power ; the loom rattles ; 
the hammer shouts; the blast furnace roars. 
Daily they unite in proclaiming the efficiency 
of inventions driven by mechanical power. 

Yet the thread of life is drawn out and the 
shears of fate are lifted against that nation 



LIFE AND LABOR 185 

which is not efficient in the consumption and 
distribution as well as in the production of 
wealth. 

The production of goods does not insure 
welfare. We who are engaged in sedentary pur- 
suits continue to eat great quantities of meat, 
thus decreasing our efficiency and shortening 
our lives. Our houses are too large; we have 
shut out air and sunshine and shut in tuberculo- 
sis germs. We clothe ourselves in conformity to 
a European mode, neglecting the demands of 
our own climate. We have not as yet learned 
the lesson of efficiency in consumption. 

Nay, more, we are hopelessly untutored in 
distributive efficiency. 

Are those growing children still living on 
white bread soaked in tea? This worker's house 
is broken and unsanitary. That baby is drink- 
ing formalin with its milk, while its mother 
stretches a stationary wage over a steadily 
rising cost of life. These people have not 
enough goods to satisfy the bare necessities of 
life — they suffer and despair — because in the 
distribution of the products of industry they 
were forgotten. Enough was produced, and to 
spare — efficiency was responsible for that; but 
some grabbed more than their share, and the 
balance did not go around. There is therefore 
gross inefficiency in the system of distribution. 

Productive efficiency alone will not suffice 
unless there is established and maintained effi- 



186 SOCIAL SANITY 

ciency in consumption and distribution; even 
productive efficiency cannot be maintained, as 
an isolated phenomenon, since the workers, on 
whom productive efficiency must finally depend, 
are deprived of the means of maintaining effi- 
ciency standards of living. 

Productive efficiency is well ; efficiency in con- 
sumption is better; but an efficient system of 
distribution is best of all, since it makes possible 
efficiency throughout all parts of society. 

Efficiency in production makes democracy an 
attainable norm instead of an unattainable 
ideal. With an efficient system of production, 
all may secure education and enjoy leisure in 
which to think and grow. Efficiency in con- 
sumption and in distribution assures this edu- 
cation and leisure to all, thus laying the founda- 
tion for prosperity and for democracy. 

This discussion has been aimed at the essen- 
tial characteristics of modern industry. So 
many discussions of the industrial issues are 
complicated by passion ! So often the inciden- 
tal matters connected with the system lead the 
thought from the main issues, that all refer- 
ence to those non-essential phases of industrial 
life have been omitted. 

Here is no mention of the tens of thousands 
of little children who live and atrophy in the 
cotton mills and the glass houses; no word has 
been said of women speeded up to the last de- 
gree of human endurance, working long hours 



LIFE AND LABOR 187 

for starvation wages ; no emphasis has been laid 
on the overwork and low wages of hundreds of 
thousands of semi-skilled and unskilled men who 
constitute such a large portion of the rank and 
file of the industrial army. Read the report of 
the Industrial Commission, of the Federal in- 
vestigation into the work of women and children, 
of the investigation into wages and hours in the 
steel industry. Turn the pages of the Pittsburg 
Survey. Examine any one of a hundred books 
which have recently appeared, describing the 
baser side of the lives of those who labor, — the 
unsanitation of houses and factories, the over- 
crowding, overwork, accidents, and underpay in 
occupations, some of which, like work in lead 
and phosphorus factories, and structural iron 
and steel work, involve an extraordinary risk 
to life and health. Tens of thousands of pages 
have been filled with the record of these things, 
yet they are not a necessary part of the present 
industrial system, and therefore, they have been 
omitted from the discussion and attention called 
only to the regular tasks — the ordinary things 
— in the lives of the workers. 

Considered thus, in its most favorable light, 
the system of modern industry appears as a 
dismal, somber, lowering, murky defile through 
which men and women pass. For long hours 
each day they put forth effort on tasks which 
in the wildest reach of the imagination could 
have no permanent interest for a sane person; 



188 SOCIAL SANITY 

the product of these tasks they do not, cannot 
use. Their work is meaningless as far as re- 
sults go; it bears no apparent relation to the 
work of the rest of the industrial world; it is 
uneducative, and in the last degree monotonous. 
Yet in this barren defile called modern industry 
are created the products which adorn our houses 
and satisfy our lives. 

Is this blessedness? Do men gather forti- 
tude, nobility of spirit, and enthusiasm from 
such labor? They make nothing entire; they 
cannot consume the fruits of their own indus- 
try; they are not even recompensed in propor- 
tion to the amount which they produce; for 
long hours, surrounded by jarring sights and 
discordant sounds, they toil to create wealth. 
What think you if a man, having twelve hours 
in a day free from the necessary duties of liv- 
ing, spends ten of these in the doing of a thing 
which in its very nature cannot be interesting 
to him? Is such a man blessed? Mayhap, if 
blessedness have a new meaning, but if the old 
meaning is still attached to the word, then such 
a man is damned, not blessed, for damnation 
consists in doing those things which are hate- 
ful, because into them men cannot put their 
whole hearts. 

In the evolution of industry, a point has been 
reached where the vast majority of those who 
labor have for their tasks clock-watching occu- 
pations. The hours never fly — they crawl. 



LIFE AND LABOR 189 

Each sixty minutes which passes is sixty min- 
utes nearer quitting time — the time of rest and 
freedom. In such labor there is no joy. In 
such monotony there can be no satisfaction. 
Highly specialized factory work is hell raised 
to the n th power. With every nerve taut, with 
every fiber stretched to the limit of its capacity, 
these workers strain to make, in their day, 
enough pieces, — perhaps a hundred, perhaps 
five hundred,— to buy only this— their daily 
bread. 

The present system of industry will not last 
forever. It represents only one scene of the 
great industrial panorama which has been un- 
folding since man first learned to use tools. No 
man can say what the future holds ; yet so long 
as specialized industry remains what it is — a 
hopeless treadmill for the great mass of the 
workers; so long as hate and loathing, not joy 
and blessedness, are involved in its processes; 
so long as each additional hour of labor counts 
one additional hour of pain; then the less of 
it the better. No sane person can continue in- 
definitely to demand of men eternal service of 
a machine. No sound thinker can expect that 
human beings will love that in which there is no 
joy. Modern specialized industry — a task-mas- 
ter armed with the sharp thong of hunger — 
drives men and women and even children to do 
things which they prefer not to do. How soon 
— men and women — leaders of the great march 



190 SOCIAL SANITY 

toward social sanity, shall we rob industry of 
its fangs? 

One question a sane society will ask — " In 
how many hours of such labor can men make 
enough goods to supply themselves with the 
necessaries and comforts of life? Can it be 
done in ten hours? Then ten hours must be 
the day's labor. Can it be done in eight hours? 
Then set the labor day at that amount.'' It is 
the enthusiasm and joy of leisure, not the nerve- 
racking misery of factory labor, which is the 
goal of sane living. That leisure may be gained 
in one way — by working long enough to provide 
for everyone the necessaries and comforts of 
life. Each invention, each scientific discovery, 
each improved process, each new method which 
increases the efficiency of industry, should, in 
like measure, reduce the time during which men 
must labor. 

Of those who labor, this alone remains to be 
said, — industry was made for man. When in- 
dustry has so wrought that it will serve the 
needs of man, uninteresting labor must cease. 



IX 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 

The present age like every other bases its 
permanence on human effort. To-day, however, 
that effort has assumed a form which is new 
to history. Machinery, labor-saving devices, 
power, and great factories such as those which 
cover the industrial districts are the product 
of this age and this alone. Men and women, 
laboring in the workshops of the twentieth cen- 
tury, create immense sums of wealth, — the fruits 
of industry. Since they sacrifice so much in 
misery and pain for the purpose of producing 
this wealth, one might expect that their share 
of it would be great indeed. 

The fruits of American industry are vast — 
unthinkably vast. The wealth which modern 
industries create, pouring forth in a never 
ending stream, clothes and feeds the body ; pro- 
vides shelter; beautifies the home; facilitates 
travel; opens schools; creates boundless stores 
of luxury. All of the marvels of the ancient 
world are not to be compared with this. The 
seven wonders become the merest commonplace. 
With a magician's wand we create the things 
which we need and enjoy. 

191 



192 SOCIAL SANITY 

Yet questions are raised. Malcontents utter 
tlieir dismal voices in the streets, appealing, 
objecting, warning. " The producers of this 
wealth never receive it," they cry. " The 
fruits of industry go to those who played no 
part in bringing them into existence. In this 
— your vaunted kingdom of man — there are 
gaping injustices. Man may be king, but his 
throne is a machine, and his royal robe is of 
rags." So loud, so insistent, has this complaint 
grown, that at last it has been listened to, here 
and there. The listeners have thought, ques- 
tioned, investigated, analyzed, discussed, and 
concluded that in certain respects the malcon- 
tent is right. That there is, in truth, a grievous 
unfairness in the manner of dividing up the 
fruits of industry. 

The wealth of society, the result of its pro- 
ductive system, is the outcome of natural re- 
sources, tools, and human effort. The present 
productive system in the United States is based 
first upon an unexcelled store of natural re- 
sources. Coal, copper, iron, water power, tim- 
ber, fertile soil, rivers and harbors, challenge 
the world for duplication. These resources 
were here when our forefathers made their suc- 
cessful trip in the Mayfloiver: they had been 
here then for countless ages. No man was re- 
sponsible for bringing them into being: no hu- 
man effort had created them. Like the world in 
which men live these resources were a part of 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 193 

the heritage of the human race — a part of man's 
kingdom. 

The great wealth-producing power of the 
nation is due, in the second place, to the store 
of tools without which any extensive exploita- 
tion of the natural resources would have been 
impossible. From the day when Watt har- 
nessed steam, through all of the succeeding 
years of invention and scientific discovery, men 
and women have been completing the tools of 
present-day industry. Steam shovels, electric 
cranes, automatic envelope machines, knitters, 
printing presses, sewing machines, gas engines, 
traction plows, reapers and binders, power 
sprayers, electric traction, are all part and par- 
cel of the productive mechanism which has been 
perfected during the last century and a half, 
No one man was responsible for any of these 
tools. The inventions of each inventor rested 
upon the inventions which had preceded, as the 
bricks of one tier rest on the bricks of the tier 
below. Without the electrical discoveries of 
the early nineteenth century, Edison's work 
would have proved impossible. It is only with 
the scientific achievements of his predecessors 
as a background that Burbank can remake veg- 
etation. The tools of production are a social 
product, — the creation of millions of burning 
brains and eager hands. The resources came, 
no man can say whither, but the productive 
tools — the agents of mechanics — are a part of 



194 SOCIAL SANITY 

the kingdom which man has been building since 
he learned to use a stick or a stone to shape 
other sticks and stones for his uses. 

In the third place, industry rests upon in- 
dustrial effort, which is the one really personal 
element in wealth production. Even effort can- 
not be wholly individual, however, because no 
one person can use modern tools. They are so 
vast, so completely inter-dependent, that only 
through co-operation in industrial activity can 
men hope to create the fruits of the industry. 
The factory is manned by a thousand, the mine 
by five hundred. Modern tools are group tools, 
usable only by groups. 

Thus of the three factors in the production 
of wealth — resources, tools, and effort, — two are 
a common heritage, while the third, though in 
a measure individual, cannot be truly effective 
unless socially employed. Productive processes 
are therefore primarily social processes, de- 
pending for their effectiveness upon the work- 
ing together of masses of men and women. 

Furthermore, since no wealth can be created 
without resources, tools, and effort, and since 
resources and tools are passive agents rather 
than active participators in industrial activity, 
it follows that the motive force in industry 
comes through human effort. More than that, 
the productive processes are carried forward 
in order that people may have the things which 
they want to use. Neither the resources nor 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 195 

the tools are ultimately to be considered. The 
whole productive machinery centers around the 
consumer, the user. It were idle to make a 
harvester if no one used flour. Silk mills would 
be inactive did all cease wearing silk. Pro- 
duction aims at and depends upon consumption. 
Wealth is produced that people may use it. 
In any rational discussion of income these facts 
must be borne constantly in mind — the passive 
character of resources and tools; the active 
character of effort; the social nature of all 
three factors; the importance of co-operation; 
and the finality of consumption. 

For each portion of wealth produced, some 
human effort must be, or must have been ex- 
pended. Under the old handicraft productive 
system, the worker with his hammer, or needle, 
or shuttle, or saw, did the work directly upon 
the thing which he made. Under the present 
system of production, nails, buttons, bolts, 
candles, socks, and steel rails are made by 
machines, but these machines were made by 
men, assisted by other machines made by other 
men. All wealth represents, directly, or in- 
directly, some portion of crystallized labor. 
Handicraft labor was crystallized directly. 
Factory labor is crystallized indirectly. Yet 
the result is the same. 

The vast output of present-day industry is 
due, primarily, to co-operation. Resources and 
tools have existed for ages, but it is only during 



196 SOCIAL SANITY 

the last century that men learned the true 
value of co-operative or social tools. Let us 
say that under the old system one hundred 
shoemakers, each working individually, could 
produce one hundred pairs of shoes in a day. 
At the present time, forty of these men are 
engaged in making machines with the aid of 
which ten shoemakers can turn out a hundred 
pairs of shoes in a day. The other men are 
absorbed into some new industry, or, if they 
cannot adapt themselves they join the ranks 
of the casually employed. For the time being 
hardship results. In the end, the number of 
labor hours required to make a pair of shoes 
is reduced to a fraction of its former amount. 
The farmer of the eighteenth century cut his 
grain with a scythe and thrashed it with a flail. 
Had he possessed a reaper and binder and a 
steam thrasher, he would have produced twenty 
times as much grain with the same expenditure 
of effort. The tools of the old-time society 
were individual, hand tools, — hammers, hoes, 
mattocks, hand looms, chisels, saws. All could 
be owned by the worker. All were light and 
easy to handle. The tools of modern industry 
— the tools with which the men of the nineteenth 
century broadened their kingdom — are social 
tools, — steam shovels, railroads, carpet fac- 
tories, department stores, banks, steel mills. 
No one man can use such tools. They are 
essentially dependent on co-operative activity. 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 197 

Neither can the worker own his tools; he must 
use the tools owned by some other person or 
by all of the workers, co-operatively. 

The wonders of modern efficiency, the fruits 
of industry, cannot be expressed in figures or 
words, yet some idea of modern productiveness 
may be gained by examining these statistics 
of production issued by the Federal Govern- 
ment. During 1911, the production of agricul- 
tural crops was:- 



# 



Bushels 

Corn 2,531,488,000 

Wheat 621,338,000 

Oats 922,298,000 

Barley 160,240,000 

Rye 33,119,000 

Buckwheat 17,549,000 

Potatoes 292,737,000 

Tons 
Hay 47,444,000 

Bales 
Cotton 11,965,000 

Similar statistics for the manufacturing indus- 
tries show the total value of the products in 
1909 to have been :— t 

* M Agriculture in the United States," Department of Commerce 
and Labor, Washington, D. C, 1910. P. 1. 

f " Statistics of Manufactures," Department of Commerce and 
Labor, Washington, D. C, 1910. P. 8. 



198 SOCIAL SANITY 

Value of Products 

All industries $20,672,052,000 

Slaughtering and meat packing 1,370,568,000 

Foundry and machine-shop 
products 1,228,475,000 

Lumber and timber products 1,156,129,000 

Iron and steel, steelworks, and 
rolling mills 985,723,000 

Flour-mill and grist-mill prod- 
ucts 883,584,000 

Printing and publishing 737,876,000 

Cotton goods, including cotton 
small wares 628,392,000 

Clothing, men % including 
shirts 568,077,000 

Boots and shoes, including cut 

stock and findings 512,798,000 

Woolen, worsted, and felt 

goods, and wool mats 435,979,000 

Tobacco manufactures 416,695,000 

Cars and general shop con- 
struction, and repairs by 
steam-railroad companies. . 405,601,000 

Bread and other bakery prod- 
ucts 396,865,000 

Iron and steel, blast furnaces 391,429,000 

Clothing, women's 384,752,000 

Smelting and refining, copper 378,806,000 

Liquors, malt 374,730,000 

Leather, tanned, curried, and 
finished 327,874,000 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 199 

Value of Products 

Sugar and molasses, not in- 
cluding beet sugar $279,249,000 

Butter, cheese, and condensed 
milk 274,558,000 

Such are the fruits of industry expressed in 
general terms. The totals are far too stupen- 
dous for the mind to grasp; nor is it neces- 
sary or desirable that the mind should grasp 
them. The significant question — the only ques- 
tion of real importance— is, ' i What happens to 
this wealth? " Does it go to the producers — 
the motive power to which it owes its being? 

There are, strictly speaking, no classes in 
the United States. That is, there are no hard 
and fast caste lines within which men are com- 
pelled to move. Yet from the standpoint of 
industry and income, there are two classes— 
those who work and those who do not. He 
who labors expends his effort in a manner 
intended to create something that will supply 
his wants or the wants of his fellows. The 
idler makes no such use of his faculties. Both 
classes receive enough to sustain life. Since 
wealth depends upon industry, and since the 
vitalizing element in industry is labor, it would 
seem that in the division of the fruits of in- 
dustry those who labored should receive the 
lion's share of the income and of the pleasures 
of life, while those who idled should receive 



200 SOCIAL SANITY 

almshouse fare, — the bare necessaries of living. 

Anomalous though it may appear, no such 
relation exists between the lives of those who 
labor and of those who idle. It is not true, 
in American society, that luxury, ease, satis- 
faction, and enjoyment attend on the lives of 
the workers, while hardships and privation 
await the idlers. No longer is the proverb 
held, — " He who will not work, neither shall 
he eat." Indeed sometimes the exact reverse 
holds true. He who never worked eats abun- 
dantly of the choicest fruits of the land. 

A man recently died in the prime of life. 
To be sure, he died a gallant death, yet never 
during his life had he been a worker. Behind 
him he left a son to whom there attached, of 
the wealth which his father had helped in no 
way to create, three million dollars. When this 
boy comes of age, three millions will go un- 
conditionally to him. If he had earned five 
dollars every working day in the year since 
the time when Jesus taught in Galilee, he would 
not have earned so much as three millions of 
dollars, yet at the age of twenty-one this is 
his, — his without effort, or privation, or pain. 

The thing which he has is wealth, not dol- 
lars. Perchance he may own land, bonds, 
stocks, mortgages, or some other form of in- 
vestment. Should he wish to convert this three 
millions into dollars, he might do so, but he has 
no such thought, because the dollars would be 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 201 

idle, whereas the bonds and mortgages bring 
interest. If the current rate be paid — five per 
cent — then three millions will return each year 
to their owner one hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars of income. He may live in St. Louis 
or in Shanghai, yet this income pursues him. 
It is his because he holds the titles to three 
millions of wealth. 

Even the three millions may increase. If a 
part of it be invested in land, and the demand 
for the land grows greater, the value of the 
land rises, and this lad, come of age, may find 
four or even five millions where his father left 
him but three, because of the increased value 
of the properties which he holds. 

From whence is this income and this in- 
creased value derived? Truly it must be from 
those who labor! There is no other source 
of wealth. 

Suppose the bonds which are held in trust 
for this boy be those of a railroad company. 
Each year they pay him five dollars for each 
one hundred dollars of bonds which he holds. 
This five dollars is the product of labor. From 
the meanest track walker up to the president 
of the system, this railroad has been, through- 
out the year, a great hive of industry. These 
men have worried, fretted, striven, sweated, and 
died that the railroad might perform its service 
successfully. This labor has its reward in the 
success of the road, and a part of the success 



202 SOCIAL SANITY 

— the earnings — is paid to the bond-holders in 
the form of interest. This lad's bonds earn 
that kind of interest. If all men on the railroad 
stopped working, there would be no interest 
to pay. It is because tens of thousands of men 
have been working on the railroad that the bond- 
holder realizes an income. All income from 
stocks and bonds is similarly derived. A num- 
ber of workers create wealth, a part of which is 
turned over to the stock and bond-holders, be- 
cause they hold title to the stocks and bonds. 

The increase in the value of the land which 
this boy holds is due to a like cause. Men 
have organized business, built buildings, paved 
streets, attracted commerce, developed trans- 
portation, and in all of the surrounding dis- 
tricts the value of land has increased because 
the locality is more desirable as a place in 
which to do business. The increased land value 
is due to labor. Yet since this lad has never 
labored, the increase must be, as indeed it is, 
due to the labor of others. They expend effort. 
He receives a part of the product of that effort. 

Throughout his life, this boy may be an 
idler. He may never raise a finger to do aught 
beside hunt, court, laugh, play, travel, and 
spend. Yet he is destined, so long as his prin- 
ciple remains intact, to receive an income of 
at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars 
each year. 

Travel to Newport; spend days and nights 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 203 

in the great hotels of New York and Chicago; 
journey on expensive ocean liners ; listen to the 
talk at social functions; and you will find that 
this lad is a rule, and not an exception. A 
whole section of the American population lives 
in idleness — lives on income. The apartment 
hotels are thronged with idle men and women 
who, from the day of their birth to the day of 
their death, contribute in no way to the labor 
of the community. True, the class is small. 
True, it is philanthropic. True, it is less than 
in Europe. Yet the class is there — spenders 
who do not labor, living lives of luxurious ease. 

How then do the workers live? They pro- 
duce the wealth. Are they likewise children 
of ease? 

Some of them are. The successful managers, 
the superintendents, buyers, sellers, heads of 
departments, foremen, and the like live well. 
While they do not come into direct contact with 
the processes of industry— neither shifting the 
levers, hammering the iron, twisting the 
threads, picking the coal, drilling the holes, nor 
shaping the castings — they perform a function 
of rare value when they bring together the 
men necessary to carry on their activities and 
direct them at their work. Such men are well 
paid. 

They form, however, but a small percentage 
of the total number of workers. In all of the 
manufacturing industries of the United States, 



204 SOCIAL SANITY 

for example, 7,678,578 persons are employed, 
of whom six in each hundred are proprietors 
and officials, eight are clerks, and eighty-six 
are wage-earners. Thus the industrial system 
has evolved to a point where more than four 
out of five of those engaged in its processes 
are wage-earners. 

Some of those who come into direct contact 
with the productive processes are also well 
paid. The skilled railroad men, steel workers, 
and employees in the building trades receive 
good incomes. Yet this group is also a com- 
paratively small one. Perhaps one wage- 
earner in ten, engaged in American industry, 
has what might be called a skilled occupation.* 
The great majority of those engaged in Amer- 
ican industry do work which is semi-skilled or 
unskilled work — work typifying monotony and 
exhaustion — and receive for it a wage which 
barely enables them to live. 

Consider the railroad employees again : — t 

Class Average Daily Wage 

General officers $13.27 

Other officers 6.22 

General office clerks 2.40 

Station agents 2.12 

Other station men 1.84 

Engine-men 4.55 

* " Wages in the United States," Scott Nearing. New York : 
Macmillian Co., 1911. Chapter IX. 

t " Statistics of Railways in the United States." Government 
Printing Office, Washington, 1912. P. 38. 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 205 

Class Average Daily Wage 

Firemen $2.74 

Conductors 3.91 

Other trainmen 2.69 

Machinists 3.08 

Carpenters 2.51 

Other shopmen 2.18 

Section foremen 1.99 

Other trackmen 1.47 

Switch tenders, crossing 

tenders, and watchmen. . . 1.69 
Telegraph operators and dis- 
patchers 2.33 

Employees — account floating 

equipment 2.22 

All other employees and 

laborers 2.01 

Some of the railroad positions are very well 
paid, yet in these positions are a fraction of 
one per cent of the total number of employees. 
The skilled men, — conductors, engine-men, and 
the like, — receive good wages, but the vast ma- 
jority of railway employees receive wages 
which are ludicrously small. 

Take the case of the employees in the iron 
and steel industry. An extended investigation 
into the wages paid to workers in the industry 
shows results very similar to those already cited 
for the railroad industry. 

" Of the total of 172,706 employees, 13,868, 
or 8.03 per cent, earned less than 14 cents per 



206 SOCIAL SANITY 

hour, 20,527, or 11.89 per cent, earned 14 and 
under 16 cents, and 51,417, or 29.77 per cent, 
earned 16 and under 18 cents. Thus 85,812, 
or 49.69 per cent of all the employees, received 
less than 18 cents per hour. Those earning 
18 and under 25 cents per hour numbered 46,- 
132, or 26.71 per cent, while 40,762, or 23.61 
per cent, earned 25 cents and over. A few 
very highly skilled employees received $1.25 
per hour ; and those receiving 50 cents and over 
per hour numbered 4,403, or 2.55 per cent of 
all employees." * 

Similar evidence is furnished by the state 
bureaus of labor. While these facts are often 
unreliable, and while most of the states do not 
furnish facts at all, the conformity of state 
figures with those already cited is remarkable.f 
When allowance is made for unemployment^ 
it is probable that nine-tenths of the male work- 
ers in American industry receive less than $800 
a year, that three-fourths receive less than $600 
a year, and a half are paid less than $500 a 
yeari 

Are not such facts surprising? More surpris- 
ing still is the contrast between these wages 

* u Summary of the Wages and Hours of Labor," Report on 
Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry, Wash- 
ington, 62d Congress, 2d Session, Senate Document 301, 1912. 
P. 10. 

t" Wages in the United States," Scott Nearing. New York: 
The Macmillan Co., 1911. Pp. 210-212. 

X Ibid. , Chapter X. 

§/^.,p. 214. 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 207 

and the amount which is sufficient to buy a 
living. On Manhattan Island, the exhaustive 
investigation made in 1907-8 permitted Dr. 
Chapin to conclude that, " an income of $900 
or over probably permits the maintenance of a 
normal standard at least, so far as the physical 
man is concerned. Whether an income between 
$800 and $900 can be made to suffice is a ques- 
tion to which our data does not warrant a dog- 
matic answer. ? ' * At the same time the Federal 
Government issued a careful study in which the 
authors decide that in Fall River, Mass., " the 
total cost of the fair standard for the English, 
Irish, and Canadian-French family is $731.99 
and for the Portuguese, Polish, and Italian 
family it is $690.52." f In small Georgia and 
South Carolina mill towns, " The father must 
earn $600.74 in order to support himself " ac- 
cording to a standard which " will enable him 
to furnish them good nourishing food and suffi- 
cient plain clothing. He can send his children 
to school. Unless a prolonged or serious illness 
befall the family, he can pay for medical atten- 
tion. If a death should occur, insurance will 
meet the expense. He can provide some simple 
recreation for his family, the cost not to be over 

*"The Standard of Living/' R. C. Chapin. New York: 
Charities Publication Committee, 1909. Pp. 245-246. 

f ' ' Report on Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners 
in the United States," Vol. XVI, " Family Budgets." Govern- 
ment Printing Office, Washington, 1911. P. 245. 



208 SOCIAL SANITY 

$15.60 for the year. If this cotton-mill father 
is given employment three hundred days out of 
the year he must earn $2 per day to maintain 
this standard. As the children grow older and 
the family increase in size, the cost of living 
will naturally increase. The father must either 
earn more himself or be assisted by his young 
children. ' ' * 

These statements relate to a man, wife, and 
three children under fourteen. If they are 
true, and there appears to be no good reason 
to doubt their accuracy, a large proportion of 
the people who are carrying forward the pro- 
ductive processes of the United States are not 
receiving a living wage. These are the laborers 
— these the people upon whose activity industry 
depends — these the vine growers and the gar- 
deners, who have tended and watched that the 
vineyards of industry might be brought to per- 
fection. These are they who labor, toil, spin, 
yet Lazarus, in all of his wretchedness, was not 
less fittingly arrayed than they. Meanwhile, be- 
hold, Dives — he who does not work — fattens on 
the choicest fruits of the industrial system. 

Meanwhile, the school cries out for efficiency; 
the church preaches industry; the rostrum 
gloats over prosperity. Efficiency — is labor; 
industry — is effort; and prosperity, — after 
these have become efficient, applying themselves 

* Supra, pp. 152-153. 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 209 

arduously to the tasks, another who has never 
labored, snatches the prosperity from them. 

It is recorded of a good dame — one Mother 
Hubbard — that she went to the cupboard to get 
her poor dog a bone, but when she got there, 
the cupboard was bare, and so of course the 
poor brute went hungry. How about Mother 
Hubbard, though? If the cupboard was bare, 
perhaps she went hungry too. Even the best 
intentioned philanthropy does not supply the 
larder. 

Turn for a moment to the little baby who 
came into a three-million-dollar fortune on the 
day he was born. Each year one hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars came to him. One hun- 
dred and fifty thousand is three hundred times 
five hundred. This child, who has never lifted 
his hand, except to play, baby fashion, has now 
an income equal to that of three hundred men 
at five hundred dollars each a year. 

Truly, it is strange. Anon, one wonders how 
such things may be. The idler, well supplied; 
the worker with a bare pittance. One man 
secure in a life without labor ; another assured 
of a life of labor without security. 

The fruits of industry are marvelous in the 
mass. Yet they cannot insure prosperity unless 
they are divided among those who need them. 
A nation may have an economic surplus, and 
yet not be a prosperous nation. Since welfare 
is the measure of economic success, the indi- 



210 SOCIAL SANITY 

vidual as well as the nation must share in real 
prosperity. The United States is immensely 
wealthy; great quantities of additional wealth 
are produced each year; and capital is being 
continually augmented, and thus the possibili- 
ties of producing more wealth are increasing. 
But it is not enough to state that the country 
is rich. What becomes of those riches? In 
" Hard Times," Mr. McChoakumchild, the 
schoolmaster, says: 

" Now this schoolroom is a nation. And in 
this nation there are fifty millions of money. 
Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number 
twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation and ain't 
you in a thriving state ? ' ' 

And in telling the story Dickens makes girl 
number twenty, the daughter of a circus clown, 
say that she doesn't know whether it is a pros- 
perous nation or not and whether she is in a 
thriving state or not, unless she knows who has 
the money and whether any of it is hers. 

Is America prosperous? Is it in a thriving 
state? Hardly! 

True, the coffers of some are overflowing, 
but they are overflowing with the portion of 
many who are plunged in the depths of adver- 
sity — the denizens of our jails, our workhouses, 
our houses of prostitution, our slums, and our 
sweat shops, unprosperous, unlovely, degraded 
in the midst of industrial prosperity and com- 
mercial glory. 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 211 

The fruits of industry go not to the indus- 
trious, but to the fortunate. He who labors 
receives not, for all of his working, while the 
idle man and the idle woman, holding titles to 
capital or to land, reap rich harvests of wealth, 
and leisure. We, the well-housed, may be con- 
tent with our comfort and security, with our 
prosperous condition and our thriving state; 
we may boast of our national industry and pros- 
perity ; we may preach and condemn and punish 
from behind our bulwarks of laws and consti- 
tutions and institutions ; but until the unnatural 
sloughs of adversity are made dry by the leveled 
mountains of unearned prosperity, the nation 
will never be truly prosperous. 

Finally, is this sanity? Can anyone suppose 
that when the workers — the producers of wealth 
— realize the extent to which their products 
are being absorbed by the drones, they will 
tolerate the continuance of such conditions? 
Then, whence will come the incentive to addi- 
tional effort; when additional effort means ad- 
ditional wealth to the unemployed well-to-do? 
Why cry, " Peace, peace," when there is no 
peace? 

The life stream of civilization has flowed 
abundantly to this day ; applied science, earnest 
effort, painstaking, soul-racking activity have 
built up man's kingdom; at the touch of the 
human hand, vast machines convert the gifts 
of nature into forms which satisfy man's de- 



212 SOCIAL SANITY 

sires; what an opportunity for life, in its rich- 
est abundance! What a glorious harvest of 
leisure, growth, achievement! What additions 
to the grandeur of the kingdom of man ! 

Alas ! Between the production of wealth and 
its use, between the expenditure of effort and 
the receipt of income stretch the traditions of 
individual ownership, which take from him who 
produces and give to him who holds titles to 
property. How wondrously have men learned 
to create wealth, in myriad forms, how stupidly 
do they blunder in the sharing of the wealth 
produced. 

Sanity! Sanity! Sanity imperatively de- 
mands fairness in distributing the fruits of in- 
dustry. After ages of experimentation human 
society has found that finally the only sane rule 
of conduct in dealings between man and man 
is the rule of equity, of justice, of fairness, of 
doing to that other as you would have him do 
to you. 

Stripped of its incidental elements, apart 
from its traditions and its glamor, the present 
scheme for dividing the fruits of industry ap- 
pears in its bald unjustness. Lay aside your 
preconceived ideas of property and property 
rights, look sanely, carefully into the matter 
from the eyrie of intellectual honesty, and find, 
if you can, a justification for giving to him that 
labors a pittance; to him that idles a compe- 
tence. In that direction social sanity does not 



THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRY 213 

lie. Inequality in distributing the fruits of in- 
dustry is the broad way that has led many 
nations to destruction. The path to social san- 
ity lies along a narrow way, through a straight 
gate, over which is written the saying — " Social 
Justice." 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 

The genus of modern life, stripped of its 
gay finery, appears as an exploiter of the many, 
and a pauperizer of tlie few. Man has estab- 
lished his kingdom in wondrous guise. Armed 
with that keen weapon, science, he has bent the 
powers of nature to his services after a manner 
wholly past the belief of earlier ages. No 
longer subject to pestilence and famine, freed 
from the fear of beasts, overcoming the sources 
of conflict between man and man, civilization 
has laid down a basis for sane living and social 
welfare. 

Here are clothing for the naked, food for the 
hungry, houses for the shelterless, books for 
the unlearned. Here then is unusual prosperity 
and sane living? Alas! no. The naked do 
not always receive the clothing; the food goes 
to him who is surfeited; houses are built for 
those who already enjoy shelter; and the books 
with uncut leaves lie on the shelves of the over- 
fed. Not always, it is true, but often society 
fails to establish a sane relation between the 
things a man needs and the things he receives. 

214 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 215 

The fruits of industry are not wisely appor- 
tioned. The material blessings of life follow 
bank accounts, when they should follow human 
needs. It is this fact which leads to the spirit 
of revolt, — to the feeling that the method of 
adjusting life to men and women might be rad- 
ically improved to the advantage of everyone. 

There is, in each breast, a potential spirit 
of revolt, because each human being recognizes 
some code of morality. Cross the threshold 
of that moral temple, and revolt follows. Each 
man recognizes and accepts some standard of 
justice, of truth, of spiritual belief. It is his 
shibboleth, his doctrine, his creed. Violate that 
creed at your peril ! 

Whatever the origin of moral ideas, whatever 
the source of human beliefs, the fact remains 
that from the lowest villain that ever swung 
from the gallows to the worthiest saint that died 
for a faith, this fact holds true, — each sets a 
standard for which he will fight either with 
the tools of physical warfare, or with that ter- 
rible weapon, non-resistance. How plainly does 
this fact stand out in all of the biography, all 
of the personal incident which the world 
records ! 

Further back than human history, the spirit 
of revolt extends. Snatch a morsel of food 
from the beasts, threaten the young of any 
animal mother and bide the issue ! The animal 
world also has a code to which it adheres with 



216 SOCIAL SANITY 

rigorous exactitude. It will enjoy the food 
which it has taken. The female will protect 
her offspring. In the defense of either of these 
causes, the beast lays down its life. 

Among men the same brute instincts prevail. 
The man who goes hungry for three days will 
lie; hungry for three days more he will steal; 
hungry for three more he will commit murder. 
Take away a man's food, deprive him of the 
physical necessities of life, and he becomes dan- 
gerous. The speeding up of prices without any 
corresponding increase in wages, of which the 
past twenty years has been so painfully con- 
scious, resolves itself finally into a problem of 
short food supply for many families. Why 
should they not revolt ? 

The human mother, sacrificing, striving for 
the welfare of her child, is also displaying a 
primitive instinct. Like the beasts she will die, 
gladly, for her offspring. 

There is, among the more advanced races 
of mankind, another cause of revolt, — an ac- 
quired characteristic, perhaps. The fight for 
food, the defense of offspring, are universal 
traits. The spirit of justice, of equity, of fair 
play, are largely human attributes. Further- 
more, the higher men rise in the scale of human 
development, the keener becomes their sense of 
fairness, until in emotionalists like Amos and 
Savonarola; or in thinkers like John Stuart 
Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, or William 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 217 

Morris, the ideals of equitableness between man 
and man are set high and any violation of this 
ideal is a cause for drastic reaction. 

When Horatius, wounded, and wearied with 
hard fighting, turned from his valiant defense 
of the bridge, all armed as he was, and plunged 
into the yellow Tiber, 

" No sound of joy or sorrow, 

Was heard from either bank, 
But friends and foes in dumb surprise, 
With parted lips and straining eyes, 

Stood gazing where he sank; 
And when above the surges 

They saw his crest appear, 
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry, 
And even the banks of Tuscany 

Could scarce forbear to cheer." 

While Horatius was manfully battling with 
the swollen current, Macaulay makes the traitor 
Sextus say: — 

€i Will not the villain drown? 

But for this stay, ere close of day. 
We should have sacked the town." 

But the leader of the opposing forces, whose 
plans Horatius had thwarted, a man of totally 
different fiber, retorts : — 



218 SOCIAL SANITY 

u ' Heaven help him/ quoth Lars Porsena, 
' And bring him safe to shore, 
For such a gallant feat at arms, 
Was never seen before! ' " 

Lars Porsena had the spirit of fair play de- 
veloped to so high a degree that he enjoyed 
seeing a man, even though an enemy, do a gal- 
lant deed. If Lars Porsena could have sat on 
the bleachers of a baseball field, cheering the 
home team on to victory, he would have ap- 
plauded with the lustiest when the visitors en- 
gineered a brilliant double steal or fielded a 
hard fly. 

The American prides himself on nothing more 
highly than the fact that he has the spirit of 
sport, of fair play, of joy over a well-earned 
victory, whether of friend or enemy. Even 
children fail to see any fun in a one-sided, un- 
fairly played game. 

Someone has described a typical Western 
farmer as a man who would gladly give a brace 
of steers to anyone who was down on his luck, 
and never so much as hope for a return. Yet, 
if a stray cur, yellow and mongrel, was adopted 
by this farmer and called " mine," a deputy 
marshal backed by a company of regulars com- 
ing to take the cur, would find the farmer well 
posted with his Winchester, ready to shoot or 
to be shot down in the defense of the dog. Hav- 
ing rights and believing in them, this type of 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 219 

man does not hesitate to stake his life on the 
outcome. The " Spirit of 76 " was a spirit of 
revolt based on a belief in " rights," and it has 
never been entirely refined ont of the American 
temperament. Perhaps the average American 
would not set up his private judgment against 
that of a company of regulars, but he would 
fight for his own whether he did it with a re- 
peater, or a law brief. Furthermore if he found 
that some small dog in his immediate neighbor- 
hood not his own was being denied a " square 
deal," he might put in a word for him too. 

It has been written that the minority have 
no rights which the majority is bound to re- 
spect. Yet, if the minority be a helpless one, 
it will receive more than its share of justice 
from most Anglo-Saxons, whose traditions lead 
them to sympathize with the under-dog, to cheer 
him, and even to assist him if occasion demands. 

This insistence on fair play for the under-dog 
is the saving grace in many American institu- 
tions. Were it not for the strongly developed 
spirit of good sport, there might be less modern 
revolt to reckon with. The spirit of sport is 
there, however, and the kindly feeling for the 
under-dog is there — two things which dominate 
the spirit of revolt. 

The revolt of the under-dog is no new thing. 
Of course, he growls, cries out, whines, protests, 
strikes back. No one expects him to take a 
thrashing without making a fight for it — he 



220 SOCIAL SANITY 

would be a despicable dog if he did. Strangely- 
enough, however, in the great game of industrial 
conflict, others besides the under-dog are taking 
a hand in the protest. Even the dog on top 
snarls, vigorously, that it isn't a good game — 
this business of condemning children in their 
cradles to lives of monotonous, under-nourished 
ineffectiveness. Then, too, the keepers who take 
the gate receipts at the great game are pro- 
testing. They are the beneficiaries, to be sure, 
but why can't they have a decent game, even 
if it does tell a little on the cash register? The 
spectators, of course, are demanding fair play 
— they have always done that, and now, even 
the women have joined the party of the mal- 
contents, insisting upon a good game, open to all 
on equal terms. This demand for honest deal- 
ing, this spirit of revolt against the old methods 
of carrying on affairs, is the dominant spirit 
in America to-day. The index of a fundamen- 
tally sane attitude of mind, the spirit of revolt 
has communicated itself rapidly to all elements 
of the population. 

The spirit of revolt has developed side by 
side with the consciousness that fair play is 
no longer the rule of the economic road. Men 
and women interested in the growth of life and 
the maintenance of sanity are learning that, 
under the industrial conditions which saw the 
nineteenth century out and the twentieth cen- 
tury in, sane living is impossible for the great 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 221 

mass of the population. Under this system: — 

1. Many of those who labor have neither the 
time nor the energy to enjoy life after the work- 
day is over. 

2. Welfare is the lot of so few — opportunity 
is so painfully restricted. 

3. Aside from any nobler aim in life, such 
a situation does not even permit of efficiency, 
since those best fitted to do certain tasks do 
not necessarily have a chance to do them. 

4. Most grotesque of all, society has per- 
fected an automatic device which takes from 
the producer a great part of the product, leav- 
ing him in a vast number of cases not even 
a decent livelihood; sets the laborer to making 
lace, and automobile bodies, when his children 
and the children of his friends need shoes, hats, 
dresses, and shirts; and finally which pours 
countless riches into the laps of an idle few. 

No one can longer doubt that there are in- 
dustrial and social burdens which press most 
heavily on the backs which are least able to 
bear them. Who can question the unfairness 
of bad milk, dark rooms, child-labor, overwork, 
premature death, and the host of other vultures 
which prey upon the common man's chance of 
life? The exploited has a clear case against the 
exploiter. The very clarity of the issue lends 
weight to the protest which the exploited makes. 

The real wonder of wonders is not the revolt 
of the exploited, but their failure to revolt. 



222 SOCIAL SANITY 

The man who leaves his miner's shanty at day- 
break, and, entering the bowels of the earth, 
labors there in the darkness and danger, in 
order that he may earn five or six hundred 
dollars a year, — a bare living for his family, 
and in order that some well-to-do man in the 
metropolis may add a new car to his crowded 
garage or send his wife to the dressmaker's for 
a five-hundred-dollar gown or to the jeweler's 
for a gracefully arranged cluster of diamonds, 
to Europe as a pastime, — such a man is not 
likely to be in the best imaginable frame of 
mind when he finds that his most earnest efforts 
will supply only the bare necessites of life for 
his wife and children, while they provide ex- 
travagant luxuries for someone who has never 
known a day of toil. Further, when hard times 
or sickness come — as they inevitably do — forc- 
ing the wife and children into the mill, the 
contrast becomes even greater. Why should 
he, the worker, skimp and starve, while she, 
the idler, tells the divorce court judge that she 
cannot possibly run her household under ninety 
thousand dollars a year? Men have starved, — 
died of hunger, — ere now with grim-set faces 
and calm souls, but never has one section of 
the population been satisfied with a loaf of black 
bread, while another section gorged itself on 
dainty viands, pouring out choice wine in liba- 
tion to its pleasures. The contrast — not the 
status — cries aloud for remedy. 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 223 

History records myriad protests against this 
contrast. The Helots of Greece; the Roman 
slaves; the Plebeians; the Peasants in the 
Middle Ages, and the rabble in France rose 
against exploitation. In the nineteenth century 
the revolutionary movements of the thirties and 
forties, the labor movement, the socialist move- 
ment, and now, last of all, the movement toward 
syndicalism are instances of the same great 
protest against the unfairness of things as they 
are. 

Walter Rauschenbusch, bespeaking the spirit 
of revolt as it appears to the teacher of religion, 
quotes Froude's famous statement, " The en- 
durance of the inequalities of life by the poor 
is the marvel of human society," and then 
writes, — " I read of the increasing inclination 
to use c direct action ' and ' sabotage * with a 
sinking of the heart, not only on account of the 
immediate damage that will be done and the 
spread of lawlessness, but because of the harm 
it will do to the cause of labor. I am Christian 
enough to believe that evil cannot be overcome 
with evil and that the recoil of violence will 
usually more than offset any immediate advan- 
tage gained by it. But I do not wonder that 
men resort to physical force. My wonder is 
that men whose physical force is the only force 
they know how to handle have used it so little. 
They have been slower to resort to violence 
than women in the agitation for the suffrage. 



224 SOCIAL SANITY 

If we could pick out a thousand employers who 
in some way have been conspicuous for their 
opposition against organized labor, put them 
all in one mill- town together, subject them to 
the average conditions of industrial workers, 
leave them just as able and energetic as they 
are now, but somehow deprive them of the hope 
of escaping from their condition and lot, they 
would have a rampant labor organization in 
running order inside of a week, and the world 
would listen to an explosion before a month 
was up. If they could not longer use the phys- 
ical force of constabulary, deputy sheriffs, Pink- 
ertons, and militia, they would fall back on 
their own physical force, and organizers of 
the American Federation of Labor would 
come in to counsel steadiness and peaceable 
methods." * 

The old-time organizations of workers for 
the most part seem to have reached the zenith 
of their power. They have improved working 
conditions, decreased hours of labor, regulated 
sanitation, helped to eliminate child-labor and 
the sweat-shops, but they have been totally 
unable to secure, even for most trade union 
members, a larger share in the products of 
industry. 

During the last two decades, prices have risen 
steadily, faster than wages. At the end of a 

*" Christianizing the Social Order," Walter Rauschenbusch. 
New York : The Macmillan Co., 1912. Pp. 191-192. 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 225 

period of phenomenal prosperity, many a 
worker is less able to supply himself with the 
necessaries of life than he was at its beginning. 
As an instrument for improving the conditions 
surrounding the lives of the workers, the union 
has succeeded, but as a means for securing a 
more equitable distribution of the means of 
livelihood, it has failed. 

In recognition of this failure, the union 
members are everywhere turning from indirect 
to direct political action — from unionism to 
socialism. This change of attitude does not 
at all involve the abandonment of the union. 
Indeed, entire unions, like the Western Federa- 
tion of Miners, vote the socialist ticket. The 
change does involve, however, a fundamen- 
tal change in attitude. Instead of waiting for 
the representative of some other interest to do 
his work for him, the socialist sends his own 
representative to the legislature. 

The socialist has a programme which is much 
larger than that of the unionist. The latter 
insists upon a readjustment of working condi- 
tions, while the socialist demands a reorganiza- 
tion of society — a reorganization which he pro- 
poses to effect through the use of the ballot. 
Socialism, therefore, finds its logical outcome 
in the formation of a political party. 

Hinted at by Fourier, Saint-Simon, Robert 
Owen, and the other communists of the early 
nineteenth century, restated and symtematized 



226 SOCIAL SANITY 

by Karl Marx and the host of co-workers who 
have written and spoken during the past forty 
years, socialism is now a factor to be con- 
sidered in any statement of political tendencies. 
In Germany, the socialist vote is larger than 
that of any other party ; in France it is increas- 
ing rapidly; in Belgium it is in entire control 
of some districts. Even in the United States, 
it is doubling with each presidential election, 
while socialist mayors, aldermen, and legisla- 
tors no longer excite comment. 

Socialism is an organized protest against the 
present system of distributing income, coupled 
with an organized effort to establish a new sys- 
tem, whereby income may be more rationally 
distributed. It has probably had more influ- 
ence on the thought of the masses and on the 
political tactics of the ruling parties than any 
other single movement in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 

Whether the syndicalist movement must be 
taken seriously, no man can yet say. The rad- 
ical wing of the Socialist Party, tired of the 
failure of their leaders to reorganize the in- 
dustrial system in cases like that of Germany 
where they are in power, propose direct action. 
" Parliamentary government," they cry, " is 
a failure. The workers must take what they 
want by direct means." These means, — first, 
the general strike, and finally the literal appro- 
priation of the productive machinery, — have 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 227 

been advocated freely in Europe, and the gen- 
eral strike has been used with telling effect. 

Unionism, socialism, and syndicalism are the 
three current channels along which the revolt 
of the worker is taking place. Thus far, these 
movements have been reasonably quiet— almost 
dignified in fact. What does the future hold 
for them? 

A group of successful young business men 
sat at lunch, discussing the Lawrence textile 
strike, when someone made this proposal, — 
11 Suppose you were a textile weaver, destined 
to be a weaver till you died. You couldn't be- 
come a mill-owner; you couldn't earn more than 
a certain wage ; you would have to live as those 
fellows live ; and when they reached the age of 
fourteen, you would have to see your children 
go into the mill." 

" Well," said a lawyer, with a strong jaw, 
i l I should be the leading agitator of the crowd, 
and so would everyone else who had red blood 
in his veins." 

Every man at the table agreed with the law- 
yer. Every man acknowledged fairly that the 
worker must fight his own fight. Each one saw 
that protest, if protest was to be made, could 
be made most effectively by the workers them- 
selves. 

The secretary of a child-labor committee 
was organizing a protest against child-labor in 
a textile district. To one of the members of 



228 SOCIAL SANITY 

the textile union, who was not enthusiastic over 
the proposition, the secretary said: — 

" Why don't you take a more active part in 
this matter? You are interested in protecting 
the children, aren't you? " 

To which the textile worker made this crush- 
ing reply: — 

" My God, man, they're our children! " 

They were — his children — his flesh and blood, 
who were being taken from schools where they 
learned little, and placed in factories where 
they learned less. They were denied higher 
education. They were denied opportunity and 
leisure, because his wage was the merest pit- 
tance. Some may wonder when the exploited 
protest. The real wonder of wonders is that 
they do not revolt. 

So patent is this fact becoming, that even 
the exploiters — the masters — are leading re- 
volts against industrial and social injustice. 
Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, a past-master 
at the game of getting rich, lost his fortune, 
his health, and finally his life, in his struggle 
with the vested interests. Whatever men may 
say or think of Johnson's methods, no one 
will question the sincerity of his intentions. 
He entered the field, made his big fight 
in a big way, and died at the moment of 
victory. 

Equally spectacular is the change in the atti- 
tude of George W. Perkins, formerly of the 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 229 

firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. Reared in 
the citadel of exploitation, Mr. Perkins, who 
had proved himself a tower of strength to the 
great financial interests, suddenly left the finan- 
cial arena, with the announcement that he pro- 
posed to spend the remainder of his days in 
disposing of his fortune for the betterment of 
mankind. The story is whispered that Mr. 
Perkins' machine broke down in an East Side 
tenement district, and that, while it was being 
repaired, Mr. Perkins had an opportunity to 
see, at first hand, life in the tenements. He 
had heard, but now his eyes burned the facts 
into his soul. 

Certainly the most interesting of the revolt- 
ing masters is Joseph Fels — a single taxer and 
multimillionaire. " I purpose," cried Mr. 
Fels, in one of his speeches, " to use my for- 
tune in overthrowing the damnable system 
which enabled me to acquire it." Mr. Fels 
means it, too. 

Patents and copyrights have been the chief 
source of Mr. Fels' fortune, though he tells, 
with charming frankness, of his successful land 
speculations. The patent office has backed him ; 
the tariff has protected him, yet Mr. Fels is 
vigorously opposed to both. During the Eng- 
lish Budget campaign, when the chief issue 
was the taxation of land values, Mr. Fels was 
financial backer, political engineer, and stump 
speaker. He has toured the United States from 



230 SOCIAL SANITY 

coast to coast, delivering single-tax addresses. 
No one who has heard his ringing denunciation 
of the present social system and his brilliant 
pleas for his panacea, can for a moment doubt 
that Mr. Fels is in dead earnest. 

No three revolting masters are better known 
in the United States, yet, while their prominence 
lends publicity to their acts, they are merely 
representatives of a great movement of dissat- 
isfaction among the masters of capital. Uni- 
versity endowments, libraries, laboratories, 
pension funds, and charitable gifts are all in- 
dications of the spirit of revolt which is work- 
ing among the very men who have profited most 
by the system of society against which they 
protest. 

If the revolt of the masters is deep-seated 
and widespread, the revolt of the beneficiaries 
is even more marked. The old generation, the 
original captains of industry, is dying, leaving 
the bulk of its vast fortunes to heirs who took 
no part in fortune-making. Some of these heirs, 
awakened to the facts of life, as they are, 
frankly refuse to continue the fortune-getting 
of their fathers, and instead, turn their atten- 
tion to some social pursuit. Notable among this 
group is the heir to the Rockefeller fortune. 
Able, public-spirited to a degree, and deeply 
concerned in social matters, this man is one 
of the leading spirits in the fight against pros- 
titution, and against the forces that lead toward 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 231 

prostitution, too. Stokes of New York, and 
Patterson of Chicago, both wealthy by inherit- 
ance, and both ardent socialists, are interesting 
examples of the extreme reaction which is tak- 
ing place among the sons of the rich men. 
Gifford Pinchot, at the end of his college course, 
faced the choice between club life in New York 
and Washington, and an occupation. He chose 
an occupation, went abroad, made himself con- 
versant with the forestry problem, and returned 
to put his knowledge into practice. Since that 
time he has been rising higher and higher in 
public estimation, until he is regarded as one 
of the most useful citizens of the nation. There 
are certain things in which Mr. Pinchot believes. 
It is for these things that he works. If the 
vested interests are in the way of his ends, 
he says so, boldly. He has succeeded in con- 
structing, for the United States, a conservation 
policy, which applies not alone to forests, but 
to every other natural resource. While it is 
undoubtedly true that the rich man's daughter 
usually idles in society, and the rich man's son 
ordinarily takes up a profession or business 
career, there is an increasing tendency on the 
part of both sons and daughters to ask 
11 Where? " and " Why? " of their unearned in- 
comes. 

When the masters and the beneficiaries ques- 
tion, and even condemn, is it any wonder that 
the spectators take sides against a grotesquely 



232 SOCIAL SANITY 

unjust system of wealth distribution? True, 
there are editors who are purchased, teachers 
who are silenced, magazines which are muzzled, 
and lecturers who, serving God and Mammon, 
frequently forget God. On the whole, however, 
the newspapers, magazines, lecturers, teachers, 
and social workers are questioning the validity 
of things as they are. These doubting 
Thomases may go no further than a discussion 
of the implications arising out of the increased 
cost of living; they may decry results without 
seeking for causes; they may vilify the trusts 
and fail to suggest any constructive policy ; they 
may sentimentalize on " the interests " and 
" Wall Street " without caring to be more 
specific, — the facts remain none the less true 
that a perusal of the leading newspapers and 
magazines, attendance on lectures, the pursuit 
of college courses, talks with social workers, 
and even church attendance, would lead the 
average man to question the validity of many 
present social arrangements. No thoughtful 
man can pass through, much less visit, a city 
slum, without questioning. Blatant display 
challenges dull poverty in such certain tones 
that even the hard of hearing cannot fail to 
attend. Why should one man — no demi-god — 
be in a position to give away ten millions of 
dollars? Perhaps the most patent fact of all 
is the discrepancy between static wages and a 
rising cost of some of the chief necessaries of 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 233 

life. Henee the spectator questions, suggests, 
insists, demands. 

Of all the revolts, the most spectacular is the 
revolt of the women, who, for ages, have been 
taught to accept the thing which is, and to be 
content with it. Traditionally, the judgment 
of women is subject to that of men in industry, 
education, literature, philosophy, and science. 
Practically in all of these fields the achieve- 
ments of women have been slight. Yet the 
last two generations have witnessed a complete 
overturning in the attitude of women as a group. 

Prior to that time a few scattering women 
had agitated this or that reform, but society 
still believed implicitly that the home was 
woman's place and that unless some untoward 
circumstance called her from it, she should stay 
there. In the transformation of social life 
which has forced women out of the home into 
spheres of varied usefulness, no factor has had 
a more potent influence than the woman's col- 
leges. 

" When I went to college," laughed a middle- 
aged woman, " only freaks registered. We 
were a queer lot — there was hardly a girl among 
us who did not have some outlandish streak 
in her make-up. Now, however, it seems to be 
quite the thing." Since it is quite the thing, 
women are flocking to colleges by the tens of 
thousands. Some study professions. Some 
take special courses in preparation for various 



234 SOCIAL SANITY 

lines of teaching, but by far the greater pro- 
portion gain from their college course a wider 
view and a spirit of co-operation, which takes 
them far from the traditional home of their 
ancestors, out into the stirring life of the world. 

Such a student was Carola Woerishoffer, 
Class of 1907, Bryn Mawr, whose recent tragic 
death forced baldly, upon public attention, the 
story of a life * which comes very near to typi- 
fying the spirit of revolt among a certain group 
of women. After receiving her degree, this girl 
went directly into social work in New York, u to 
learn and to help," she said, " she was open- 
minded and open-hearted. She feared no one, 
she was insatiable in her curiosity and her love 
of adventure. She was full of passionate en- 
thusiasm — a fiery patriot — a worshiper of 
everyone who did things." 

The descendant of public- spirited parents, 
with large funds at her command, this young 
woman threw herself enthusiastically into the 
maelstrom of New York social problems. First 
she provided a large part of the money neces- 
sary to finance a congestion exhibit, which 
showed to New York some of the sore spots 
hidden for so long. Then, for four months, she 
worked as a novice in the city's laundries in 
order to make a report on the conditions sur- 
rounding the women workers there. When the 

* u A Noble Life," Ida M. Tarbell. American Magazine, July, 
1912. Pp. 281-287. 



THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 235 

shirtwaist workers struck, she provided bail 
bonds up to the sum of ninety thousand dollars 
for the host of girls who were arrested for street 
picketing. Appointed to a post in the New York 
Bureau of Industries and Immigration, she took 
up that work with the same vigor that had char- 
acterized her other activities. It was in the 
course of one of her inspection trips that she 
was thrown from a machine and killed. 

Carola Woerishoffer was an example, but she 
was also a type— an extreme type, perhaps — 
of the women who have come to realize that 
some of the problems lying without the home 
are as much of her business as those strictly 
domestic duties to which she has been accus- 
tomed. She felt, saw, and did. She was edu- 
cated, she was intelligent. She was rich, but 
before all, she was a member of present-day 
society. Together with an increasing army of 
earnest women, she took her membership duties 
seriously. 

Illustrations might be heaped together to 
establish the point. They abound on every side. 
A woman who was studying the regulation of 
prostitution in New York, was seeking to in- 
terest the wives of a number of influential men 
in her plan to be arrested as a street walker, 
in order that she might gain a most intimate 
knowledge of the problem. She hoped that, if 
these women stood by her, most of the unpleas- 
ant consequences of arrest might be avoided. 



236 SOCIAL SANITY 

So she explained the advantages of her scheme 
and the dangers incident to it. One of the 
ladies, who had been listening intently to the 
discussion, leaned forward, suddenly. 

" Don't do it just yet," she begged; " wait 
until I can go with you." 

The campaign for suffrage, for clean streets, 
pure milk, sanitary housing, safe factories, de- 
cent hours, wise regulations of the work of 
women and children are all part of the women's 
revolt. The traditionally weaker sex has be- 
come strong; the supposedly passive part of 
the human race has become aggressive. Women 
have awakened to the needs of the day, re- 
sponding nobly to the call for action. A cen- 
tury ago, women were hardly counted in the 
scheme of things. Starting from a life sur- 
rounded by numberless restrictions and tradi- 
tions, the women have moved fast and far in 
their campaign for a keener social justice and a 
higher social morality. 

The spirit of revolt has not been felt by 
everyone. There are men and women in all 
walks of life who are thoroughly satisfied with 
things as they are. Yet there is not a single 
group in the modern world from the weariest 
toilers to the weariest idlers which has not 
somewhere in its ranks a band of " reformers," 
" progressives," or " radicals " who preach 
enthusiastically the doctrine of revolt. 



XI 

THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 

The spirit revolt is the negative pole of 
which the passion for progress is the positive. 
Finding the injustice of the present intolerable, 
the soul turns the eye of faith to the future, 
believing that there lies something greater and 
better than anything that has been. In the full- 
ness of time, with the growth of man's king- 
dom, these greater, better things will come to 
pass. To-day paves the road over which to- 
morrow will journey to a brighter future. Al- 
ready the revolters of the present sense th£ 
grandeur of that future; already they feel the 
grip of its sure fulfillment; and although they 
may never see, with the eyes of the flesh, the 
consummation of those things for which they 
have labored, although they will never hear, 
as did the anxious-watching Columbus, the cry 
of " Land, land! "; they may yet ascend Mount 
Horeb, and with the eyes of the spirit view 
the promised land. 

The passion for progress is a human passion 
of gripping power. Once this passion has 
secured possession of a soul, until that soul 

237 



238 SOCIAL SANITY 

parts from the body, it may rest neither by 
night nor by day. One thing alone remains, — 
it must strive, ardently, incessantly, for the 
thing which the spirit has seen. The passion 
for progress is to its votaries a religion, deeply 
felt, fiercely believed. The passion for progress 
leads men to the stake and to the gallows. It 
compels, ennobles, inspires. 

Shelley, high priest among the poet-prophets 
of the nineteenth century, writes in his Preface 
to " Prometheus," — " Let this opportunity be 
conceded to me of acknowledging that I have, 
what a Scotch philosopher characteristically 
terms, l a passion for reforming the world.' 
. . . For my part I had rather be damned with 
Plato and Lord Bacon, than to go to Heaven 
with Paley and Malthus." It is no less an 
enthusiasm which fills his poetry with its un- 
surpassed human fire, which thrilled through 
his life from boyhood until his death. Always 
he found it better to be damned with the choice 
spirits of change than to be saved among the 
worshipers of things as they are. To the pas- 
sionate lover of freedom and progress no less 
a choice was open. His world was a becoming 
world, and his soul, fired with the grandeur of 
what is and with glory of what might be, cried 
out always, in vehement protest. His spirit 
breathes in Prometheus 's reply to those who are 
lamenting over his prospective torments. 
Bound to the precipice, because of his love for 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 239 

mankind, and his service for the human race, 
he has been sentenced to torture by the furies. 
Even the messenger whom Jupiter has sent to 
inflict the torture cannot conceal his admira- 
tion of Prometheus, but exclaims : — 

11 Mercury. — Alas! I wonder at, yet pity 

thee." 
" Prometheus.— P ity the self-despising slaves 
of Heaven, 
Not me, within whose mind sets peace 

serene, 
As light in the sun, throned. How vain 

is talk! 
Call up the fiends." 

The fiends appear, threaten Prometheus, and 
then torture mankind, for whose welfare Prome- 
theus has sacrificed so much. The conflict is a 
terrible one. The soul of Prometheus, who rep- 
resents the new order of love and faith, and the 
spirit Jupiter, who is the god of the old, struggle 
for mankind. Jupiter, for the moment victori- 
ous, yet fears one thing :— 

" The soul of man, like unextinguished fire, 
Yet burns toward heaven with fierce reproach 

and doubt, 
And lamentation and reluctant prayer, 
Hurling up insurrection, which might make 
Our antique empire insecure, though built 
On eldest faith, and helVs coeval, fear." 



240 SOCIAL SANITY 

Nor is his dread groundless, for Eternity 
comes to lead the ruler of heaven to the Abyss, 
where he must dwell in darkness for evermore. 
Jupiter curses, threatens, cries for mercy, and 
then, feeling the pinions of defeat upon him, 
he laments that Prometheus cannot be his judge, 
for despite all of the torture which he has in- 
flicted upon him he well knows that 

" He would not doom me thus. 
Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not 
The monarch of the world J " 

No sooner has the spirit of Prometheus tri- 
umphed than a great change comes over the face 
of the world. Crass exteriors, evil, wrong, hate, 
misery, and vice, lose their grip on men and 
things so that in a twinkling the light of 
Prometheus 's victory is all-pervasive. It is 
this vision which the Spirit of the Earth de- 
scribes : — 

" My path lately lay through a great city 
Into the woody hills surrounding it: 
A sentinel ivas sleeping at the gate: 
When there was heard a sound, so loud, it 

shook 
The towers amid the moonlight, yet more 

sweet 
Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all; 
A long, long sound, as it would never end: 
And all the inhabitants leapt suddenly 
Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets, 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 241 

Looking in ivonder up to Heaven, ivhile yet 
The music pleaded along. . . . and soon 
Those ugly human shapes and visages 
Of ivhich I spoke as having ivrought me pain, 
Passed floating through the air, and fading 

still 
Into the winds that scattered them; and those 
From whom they passed seemed mild and 

lovely forms 
After some foid disguise had fallen, and all 
Were somewhat changed, and after brief sur- 
prise 
And greetings of delighted ivonder, all 
Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn 
Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and 

snakes, and efts, 
Could e'er be beautiful? yet so they were, 
And that with little change of shape or hue." 

Nowhere in literature is there a passage 
which surpasses this in portrayal of the world 
as it will be when men have replaced fear and 
hate by love and hope. No poet better than 
Shelley could have penned such a prophecy, 
because in him the prophetic spirit ran deep 
and strong. 

Shelley is not alone in his hope for the fu- 
ture. The passion for progress breathes in 
other men. The great French idealist, like the 
English poet, believed in the future. At a mo- 
ment of fateful import, just before the dawn 



242 SOCIAL SANITY 

which marked the time of his execution, Gauvain 
looked into the future. His crime was one 
against the Republic, — he had aided the escape 
of a prisoner whose calm bravery in a terrible 
crisis had won his love and esteem. In these last 
moments of his life, spent with his much loved 
tutor, Gauvain spoke of the future, appraising 
its indescribable possibilities. 

" This is my thought, constant progression. 
If God had meant man to retrograde he would 
have put an eye in the back of his head. Let 
us look always toward the dawn, the blossom- 
ing, the birth ; that which falls encourages that 
which mounts. The cracking of the old tree is 
an appeal to the new." 

" Let us be a human society, greater than 
Nature? Yes. If you add nothing to Nature, 
why go beyond her? Content yourself with 
work like the ant; with honey, like the bee. 
Remain the working drudge instead of the 
queen intelligence. If you add to Nature, you 
necessarily become greater than she ; to increase 
is to augment ; to augment is to grow. Society 
is Nature sublimated. I want all that is lacking 
to bee-hives, all that is lacking to ant-hills — 
monuments, arts, poesy, heroes, genius. To 
bear eternal burdens is not the destiny of man. 
No, no, no ! No more pariahs, no more slaves, no 
more convicts, no more damned ! I desire that 
each of the attributes of man should be a symbol 
of civilization and a patron of progress ; I would 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 243 

place liberty before the spirit, equality before 
the heart, fraternity before the soul. No more 
yokes ! Man was made not to drag chains, but 
to soar on wings. No more of man the reptile. 
I wish the transfiguration of the larva into the 
winged creature ; I wish the worm of the earth 
to turn into a living flower and fly away? " * 

So shines the hope of the future in the soul 
of poet and idealist. Time was when they alone 
might justly claim these domains. So far away 
they seemed that when men thought of them at 
all it was in terms of a paradise, where ease and 
luxury should replace the hardships and nig- 
gardliness of a too unwilling world. To-day, 
the spirit of progress has made its home in the 
breasts of men in many walks of life. On all 
sides the ranks of the children of the established 
order are giving place to a new company, — the 
children of the forward look. Or rather say 
that these latter children have forced them- 
selves, sometimes in the face of the most vigor- 
ous opposition, into the place once occupied by 
the established order. They are full of anima- 
tion, enthusiasm, vitality, life. " These Chil- 
dren of the Forward Look are the really sig- 
nificant part of society. They make it worth 
while. They dance on ahead with light feet and 
merry hearts and high purpose, — the leaders, 
prophets, poets, artists, heretics, protestants, — 
singing one song in many places and in many 

* 44 Ninety-Three," Victor Hugo : " The Dungeon. " 



244 SOCIAL SANITY 

tongues — the Song of the Beyond-Man. It is 
this life-giving hope which keeps our merry 
company of free spirits in such high good hu- 
mor. They are not dull and overfed and con- 
tented. They are alert with the wine of life. 
They are hungry for more life. They are con- 
tented, not with the present, but with the fu- 
ture." * 

Everywhere the cry is heard, — the cry of 
these hopeful ones. On all sides it arises. So 
far has it penetrated the atmosphere of the 
times, that dull scientists, touched with its 
spirit, burst strong and full-bodied into poetic 
splendor of language and of thought. Eestive 
under the prescribed bonds of pure science, the 
great Huxley speaks from the heart of the things 
of this life for the science of the future, — ' ' But 
in every age, one or two restless spirits, 
blessed with that constructive genius, which can 
only build on a secure foundation, or cursed 
with the spirit of mere skepticism, are unable 
to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track 
of their forefathers and contemporaries, un- 
mindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike 
out into paths of their own. The skeptics end 
in the infidelity which asserts the problem to 
be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the 
existence of any orderly progress and govern- 
ance of things: the men of genius propound 

# "Pay Day," C. H. Henderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 
1911. Pp. 3, 4. 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 245 

solutions which grow into systems of Theology 
or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language 
which suggests more than it asserts, take the 
shape of the Poetry of an epoch." * 

How splendid such a view, coming, as it does, 
strong-scented with the odors of the dissecting 
table and the lecture room! Even from the 
least of these, — even from the deductive ana- 
lysts, tearing in pieces the- kingdoms of earth, 
and rejecting the kingdom of heaven, if for 
no other reason than because it will not yield 
itself to the edge of the keenest scalpel, — from 
among such arise prophetic ones who see in the 
materialism of their science a faint reflection 
of the spirituality of all things. Although Hux- 
ley dealt admirably with the minutiae of the 
kingdom of the world, the idea of the great 
whole never escaped him. Always his vision 
transcended the immediate present, revealing to 
him a future rich in endless possibilities. 
" Healthy humanity finding itself hard-pressed 
to escape from real sin and degradation will 
leave the brooding over speculative pollution 
to the cynics and the i righteous overmuch ' 
who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in 
blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible 
world, and in inability to appreciate the gran- 
deur of the place Man occupies therein." f 

*" Man's Place in Nature," T. H. Huxley. New York: D. 
Appleton & Co., 1902. Pp. 77, 78. 
\Ibid. t p. 154. 



246 SOCIAL SANITY 

Hear the voice of one other philosopher of 
the future, — Nietzsche, called " brutalist " by 
those, the children of the established order, be- 
cause he saw a vision which their narrower 
souls could not compass. 

" What? " he cries in indignant protest. 
11 A fatherland, Thither striveth our rudder, 
where our children's land is. Out thither, 
stormier than the sea ; our great longing storm- 
eth. " " Unto my children shall I make amends 
for being the child of my fathers ; and unto all 
the future shall I make amends for this pres- 
ent! " " my brethren, not backward shall 
your nobility gaze, but forward! Expelled ye 
shall be from all fathers' and forefathers' 
lands! Your children's land ye shall love, (be 
this love your new nobility!) 

" The land undiscovered, in the remotest sea ! 
For it bid your sails seek and seek! " " All 
those who do not wish to live unless they learn 
to hope again, unless they learn from thee, ! 
Zarathustra, the Great Hope! " * 

The classic civilizations died when they lost 
hope. Having subjected the world to their polit- 
ical sway, they retired, blase, to the feast halls, 
or else, satiated with conquest, languished for 
other worlds to subdue. Limited to military 
glory and speculative philosophy, they early 
reached the final possibilities of each, and then 

♦"Thus Spake Zarathustra." 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 247 

left them, almost gladly, to the hands of the 
barbarians. How has our world broadened! 
Experimental science and mechanics open the 
way to the vaster reaches of metaphysics; ex- 
perimental democracy holds untold possibilities 
for future efforts, and the world, tied close with 
threads of steel and invisible bands of electric 
discharge, presses eagerly forward, its eyes 
fixed on the future, searching, searching, for 
life, joy, satisfaction. Not alone among the 
mighty, outside the vale of culture and hered- 
itary greatness, this passion has taken firm hold 
upon the minds of men. It doth not yet appear 
what we shall be, but surely, surely, the future 
holds many things grander than the things of 
to-day. The fire of progress burnt out among 
the ancients, for lack of fuel. For us, the re- 
sources seem limitless, and the fire burns bright 
and strong — sometimes even raging. 

Greatest factor of all perhaps, in the world- 
sweep of the passion for progress, is the con- 
sciousness that society may in large measure 
grant or withhold the most essential of all of 
the factors in progress — opportunity. Oppor- 
tunity is in the hands of men. The kingdom 
of man may be made either a garden of oppor- 
tunity, or a desert of fatalistic determinism, and 
men do the work. 

Yet once more the doubters storm the citadel 
of hope. Time was when in answer to any argu- 
ment for progress, they could recline luxuri- 



248 SOCIAL SANITY 

ously on the down cushions of an easy faitH 
and reply, — " Let be ! It is the will of God," — 
a dirge which has lulled to sleep thousands of 
rising consciences ; a requiem moaned over the 
corpse of many a long cherished hope. In the 
bitterness of her rebellious spirit, Glad, on be- 
ing admonished to heed the will of God, cries : — 

" When a dray run over little Billy an' 
crushed 'im inter a rag, an' 'is mother was 
screamin' an' draggin' 'er 'air down, the curick 
'e ses, i It's Gawd's will,' 'e ses — an' 'e ain't no 
bad sort neither an' 'is fice was white an' wet 
with sweat — \ Gawd done it,' 'e ses. An' me, 
I'd nussed the child, an' I clawed me 'air sime 
as if 'was 'is mother an' screamed out, ' Then 
damn 'im ! ' ' ' * 

There is still an intrenchment, behind which 
the children of the established order make a 
determined stand. No longer able to shoulder 
the results of social misdoing upon a merciful 
God or a convenient devil, they answer " Alas, 
that is human nature. ' ' Human nature ! What 
is human nature? Is it the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever more? There is then no 
beyond man, no forward look? Humanity alone 
of all the great universe is standing still. Each 
other thing is changing with the times. Man 
remains. 

What more hopeless or absurd concept than 
that human nature does not change. Man, like 

* u Dawn of a To-inorrow," Francis H. Burnett. 



THE PASSION FOR PROGRESS 249 

every other being, was, and he becomes. His life 
is a continuous transformation. Contrast the 
human nature of western Europe with the hu- 
man nature of the Caledonian savages. In 
every line man differs from man. There are 
certain things common to all humanity — five 
fingers on each of two hands; two eyes; the 
power of speech; emotions; rage; fear; hate; 
sex passion; judgment and reason. Compare 
each of these things, and you will find that, even 
in these, the two groups of men differ. The atti- 
tude, the thoughts, the spirit of their living — by 
far the most important element in a civilization 
— have utterly changed. 

The Caledonian, the Tasmanian, — they know 
nothing of love, of altruism, of science, — con- 
cepts which are a part of the heritage of the 
Western races. Notwithstanding the exceptional 
cases of abnormal inhumanity man has ad- 
vanced; human form and human nature have 
both evolved. In the future lie yet greater 
triumphs. 

The " will of God " was a bogey, used to 
frighten half -tutored savages. " Human na- 
ture " is a shibboleth, having for its justifica- 
tion about the same elements of truth and error 
as does any other shibboleth. Attend! while 
the passion for progress speaks of the future, 
made possible through the will of man. 



xn 

THE QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 

Though we are imbued with the passion for 
progress, though we feel within us the spirit 
of revolt, we would be sane. Each issue as it 
is presented we would face in the spirit of sci- 
ence; each new day we would begin in the at- 
mosphere of virile, sound living. We would en- 
large, with all of the power that lies in us, man's 
kingdom. Within the boundaries of that king- 
dom we would insure welfare and guarantee 
human rights. 

As a community we would be sane — sane in 
living, sane in labor, sane in thought, sane in 
belief. We covet social sanity. 

Yet how clearly does it appear, even to our 
dull senses, that a living for one is not truly 
sane until a living has been assured to all. 
Above all else, how obvious does it seem that 
each child that comes into the world must be 
given a legitimate chance to develop whatever 
power lies within him. If people were born 
with a fatalistic curse upon their lives, pre- 
destined to wrongdoing; if total depravity were 
an inherited thing, the product of the degen- 

250 



QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 251 

eracy of past ages, progress would be impos- 
sible. During the centuries when such ideas 
were held, little progress was made because each 
person felt the impossibility of a forward move- 
ment. The last few years have witnessed a 
transformation in this attitude. Thinkers have 
turned from the total depravity theory to the 
universal capacity theory. Now, on all sides, 
they vigorously maintain the possibility of im- 
provement if opportunity is made universal. 

Why afford opportunity? Why, indeed? 
Why seek welfare in adjustment? It is true 
that some men are born to be hewers of wood 
and drawers of water, born without ambition 
or capacity, born without the qualities which 
make men run steadily. Nevertheless, the chil- 
dren of these men may, and frequently do, have 
ambition, capacity, and quality. It is for them 
that we provide universal opportunity. It is 
because of the infinite, unknown possibilities of 
each soul that we seek to start each man at the 
same mark, well equipped for the race of life. 
He may drop out of the race before he has 
completed his first lap, but he may go to the 
end, — a triumphant victor. The possibility that 
he may be worthy is the ground on which we 
demand opportunity for him. 

The scientific discoveries of the past fifty 
years have led inevitably to the conclusion that 
the great majority of men are born with rela- 
tively equal capacities. The real differences in 



252 SOCIAL SANITY 

the achievements of their lives are made by the 
variations in opportunity. This necessitates a 
revision of the old social code, and the adop- 
tion of the newer, broader standard. 

Some men are depraved, sinful, wicked; na- 
ture's man is a good man: therefore, " Back to 
nature," cried Eousseau. " Humanity is iden- 
tity," insisted Hugo. There is in every man 
a spark which the light will cause to develop, 
but which, in the darkness of ignorance, is 
crusted and blackened until its radiance is well- 
nigh extinguished. Emerson in like spirit con- 
tended that, " Every man is a divinity in dis- 
guise." And later Lester F. Ward, analyzing 
the problem at length in his " Applied Sociol- 
ogy," contends earnestly that in a great major- 
ity of cases opportunity makes the man. 

Two children are born on the same day — born 
with equal power of body, mind, and soul. One 
is carefully fed, well clothed, and housed, taken 
to the mountains in summer, surrounded by cul- 
tured men and women and by congenial play- 
mates, sent through school and college, and at 
the age of twenty-two established in a law office 
with the best of recommendations and prospects. 
The other child, badly fed and housed, grows 
up in an atmosphere of neglect. His body is 
anemic ; his mind is untrained. His father, who 
never earned more than a pittance, falls sick; 
so at twelve the undeveloped, neglected boy is 
sent, without encouragement or outlook, to tie 



QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 253 

threads in a cotton mill. At twenty-two lie is 
earning nine dollars a week. At times the am- 
bition to study law has flitted across his mind, 
but who would support mother and the children 
while he was at his books? He dismisses the 
thought, and goes on with his work. If the first 
boy had been similarly reared, he would be in 
the cotton factory. The start was uneven ; one 
boy had a handicap of physique, mental train- 
ing, soul expansion, and ten years of freedom 
to play and grow. The other boy was damned 
in his cradle. It is for his sake, — for the boy 
who might have been a brilliant lawyer, — that 
we preach the doctrine of opportunity. 

An overwhelming majority of people are nor- 
mal at birth, and if given an opportunity will 
lead normal, happy lives. Were opportunity 
provided, adjustment would be assured. Each 
new generation presents the same spectacle. 
Children are born with capacity. Congestion, 
low standards of food and clothing, overwork, — 
all of these things crush the qualities which 
make for achievement. Society abounds in ca- 
pacity which is latent — unused — because of the 
lack of opportunity for its development. This 
capacity is needed, and its development, a social 
responsibility, is intimately dependent upon the 
socializing of opportunity. 

In order to secure this universality of oppor- 
tunity which will insure individual development, 
some changes must be made in the environment. 



254 SOCIAL SANITY 

Families are underpaid and badly housed; the 
children are sent into the mills at fourteen ; the 
school system does not prepare its pupils for 
life ; men die at an early age because of indus- 
trial accidents, sickness, and other preventable 
causes of death. In these and a thousand other 
ways, the opportunity of the individual is cur- 
tailed by a defective environment. 

Eegarding these conditions advocates of 
progress are in virtual agreement, — they may 
all be reshaped, adjusted, if society wishes to 
advance. Disadvantageous social conditions 
are the work of man. No divine will has placed 
them in the path of progress. They are the 
creation of human society, and as such may be 
socially eliminated. Further, they are being 
rapidly changed through the activity of a public 
opinion, aroused by the reformers, insurgents, 
or progressives, — by whatever name they are 
called. Seeing the path clear before them, these 
believers in progress are insisting upon a com- 
plete adjustment of the environment to the needs 
of man. 

Bead where you will in the writings of those 
who believe in progress, and you will find that, — 
(1) opportunity is the goal; (2) all people are 
worth while; and (3) adjustment is possible. 
With such a basis of agreement as to ends, but 
one thing remains, — the reformers must agree 
upon the method necessary for their attainment. 
Agreement has been reached regarding all the 



QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 255 

important premises on which progress is based. 
The only real disagreement relates to the 
method of insuring progress. 

Even as regards method a measure of unison 
prevails. It is generally admitted that improve- 
ments are made through evolution rather than 
through revolution. Sudden disturbances do 
not effect important changes, either biologic or 
social. Revolutions do occur, — providing much 
food for thought. Nevertheless, no man can 
conceive of a revolution which would result in 
changing the methods of thought or the motives 
of activity of any one generation of people. 
The incoming of the factory system and the 
enunciation of Darwin's concept of evolution, 
are good illustrations of revolutionary changes. 
In both of these cases, the change in popular 
opinion has required decades for its comple- 
tion. The pages of biologic and of social his- 
tory are written in terms of slow change. 

An even more perfect agreement exists 
among reformers on the subject of education. 
Each concludes his programme with the state- 
ment, "If you will but educate the popular mind 
to a point of intelligent thinking, it will rec- 
ognize the fundamental worthiness of my 
scheme for reform. Education must, however, 
precede conversion." This idea of the neces- 
sity of education underlies the work of every 
reformer, who sees plainly that education lays 
the foundation for progress. 



256 SOCIAL SANITY 

Here lies the path toward opportunity. Here, 
ready at hand, are the means, — capable men 
and women, educational machinery, and a be- 
lief in the possibility of improvement. Does 
mankind still hesitate? Do intelligent beings 
still pause? Does anyone dream that there is 
not need for drastic readjustment? Hardly! 
Then why wait longer? This is surely the ac- 
ceptable time! 

Why wait? Only because the traditions of 
the past hamper the movements of large bodies. 
Only because, things having been done in a cer- 
tain way for a time, it becomes anti-social even 
to suggest that they be done in another way. 
These methods have been used in past ages; 
they have been tested and tried; they are at 
least workable; why change? 

What validity attaches to such an argument? 
How much of truth does such a doctrine hold? 
We are bound to the past — how strictly? Here 
be our declaration of faith in yesterday, to-day, 
and to-morrow : — 

We are living, breathing, aspiring, believing 
women and men, standing upright, looking hope- 
fully, fearlessly, into the future. In our beings 
surges the spirit of the twentieth century — our 
century. To the warnings, predictions, and be- 
hests of the past we pay this much heed — they 
built, they formulated, they aspired, they hoped 
— for all of these things we respect them. 
Where the foundation which they built was 



QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 257 

strong and sound, we erect upon it our super- 
structure; those of the formulas which have 
proven of value, we accept ; their prophecies we 
observe with critical interest; their hopes — the 
hopes of progressing humanity — we honor. But 
we, too, are human beings. We build. We 
formulate. We aspire. We hope. We, now, 
in the tense, vital, full-starred present, live our 
lives, — lives which they in the dead past cannot 
share; lives which those others, yearning to us 
out of the plastic future, will bless or curse ac- 
cording as we shape them. 

Good is it that thou sayest, " I am the child 
of my fathers. ' ? Better is it that thou sayest, 
" I am a man among men." Best of all it is 
when ye shall join your voices in a mighty 
anthem of thanksgiving, crying unto the uni- 
verse, " We are the progenitors of an unsur- 
passed future." 

The past lived and died in the past. Ours 
is the present — the time in which we re-plight 
our faith with the spirit of the living God in 
us; in which we beget and bear noble children; 
in which we pledge ourselves to a new declara- 
tion of life wherein it shall be written that every 
child born into the world must have an equal 
chance to share the good things which the world 
holds in store. Misery, vice, starvation, low 
wages, unearned fortunes, squandered luxury, 
blackest inhumanity, are in the past. Let them 
die there. For we, in our generation, have here 



258 SOCIAL SANITY 

highly resolved that when the day comes that 
our bones shall be laid to rest beside those of 
our fathers, the world in which we lived and 
labored and loved will be fuller than it has 
even been before of the joy in noble living. 

The time has come to organize a sane society, 
— a society of men and women who are educated, 
efficient, cultured ; a society in which health and 
life are conserved; a society of which justice 
is the corner-stone, with ennobled manhood and 
womanhood the central dome, reaching to high 
heaven. 

Full of hope the world is turning to the fu- 
ture, enthusiastic, prophetic, in the faith of its 
appeal. Surmounting their narrower selves, 
men have come to feel that :— 

" We build the ladder by which ive rise 
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, 
And mount to the summit round by round." 

No longer are we depending upon the hands 
of some other. Each day must the rungs be 
shaped and placed, and each day it is the hand 
of man that must do the work. Through the 
upbuilding of the race, through the reconstruc- 
tion of civilization, by means whereof the mind 
of man has not yet even dreamed, shall man 
build beyond-man ! 

Pessimism, gripping men in bygone days, had 
led everywhere to the backward look. Unsat- 



QUINTESSENCE OF SOCIAL SANITY 259 

isfied humanity gazed longingly into the past, 
then turned to look hopelessly into the future, 
" Time was," whispers the demon within them, 
and deaf to any other voice, lost in contempla- 
tion of glories long since passed away, these 
men of little vision have felt the present fall 
from them like a garment; the future withers 
away, hopeless and meaningless ; while the light 
of the golden ages long passed has flooded the 
aching heart and gladdened the empty, somber 
chambers of their lives. 

Upon such a field of desolation,— a kingdom 
which man was giving over to the fowls of 
the air, the beasts of the field, the goblins of 
black despair, and the will-o'-the-wisp of 
the golden ages long gone by, — the spirit of 
science has led optimism. In a twinkling the 
face of the world changes. Through the eyes 
of faith, man sees beyond the structures of the 
present into the golden wonders of an untried 
future. In the chaos of a struggling civilization 
he sees the partially completed records of his 
greatness and the greaterness of his children's 
children. Delusion vanishes; and afflicted 
man, rousing himself from his lethargy, learns 
to believe that the hope of the present is not 
in the past, but in the future. The world is 
becoming — becoming under his guidance. The 
gates of his kingdom are thrown wide before 
him. Shall he enter in? He may continue to 
gloat on the past, reclining in his easy chair 



260 SOCIAL SANITY 

of prejudice, bigotry, and tradition, — Canute- 
like, commanding the waves of the spirit of 
progress to refrain from lapping his feet ; or he 
may make himself a part of the spirit of the 
times, and, thrilled with the passion of progress, 
strive ardently to broaden the borders of the 
kingdom of man. 



NOV 10 !9!3 



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